VFloat: A Variable Precision Fixed- and Floating-Point Library for Reconfigurable Hardware

摘要

Optimal reconfigurable hardware implementations may require the use of arbitrary floating-point formats that do not necessarily conform to IEEE specified sizes. We present a variable precision floating-point library (VFloat) that supports general floating-point formats including IEEE standard formats. Most previously published floating-point formats for use with reconfigurable hardware are subsets of our format. Custom datapaths with optimal bitwidths for each operation can be built using the variable precision hardware modules in the VFIoat library, enabling a higher level of parallelism. The VFIoat library includes three types of hardware modules for format control, arithmetic operations, and conversions between fixed-point and floating-point formats. The format conversions allow for hybrid fixed- and floating-point operations in a single design. This gives the designer control over a large number of design possibilities including format as well as number range within the same application. In this article, we give an overview of the components in the VFIoat library and demonstrate their use in an implementation of the K-means clustering algorithm applied to multispectral satellite images.