Embedded floating-point units in FPGAs

  • Authors:
  • Michael J. Beauchamp;Scott Hauck;Keith D. Underwood;K. Scott Hemmert

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Washington;University of Washington;Sandia National Laboratories;Sandia National Laboratories

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/SIGDA 14th international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Due to their generic and highly programmable nature, FPGAs provide the ability to implement a wide range of applications. However, it is this nonspecific nature that has limited the use of FPGAs in scientific applications that require floating-point arithmetic. Even simple floating-point operations consume a large amount of computational resources. In this paper, we introduce embedding floating-point multiply-add units in an island style FPGA. This has shown to have an average area savings of 55.0% and an average increase of 40.7% in clock rate over existing architectures.