Area-Efficient Architecture for Dual-Mode Double Precision Floating Point Division

摘要

Floating point division is a core arithmetic widely used in scientific and engineering applications. This paper proposed an architecture for double precision floating point division. This architecture is designed for dual-mode functionality, which can either compute on a pair of double precision operands or on two pairs of single precision operands in parallel. The architecture is based on the series expansion multiplicative methodology of mantissa computation. For this, a novel dual-mode Radix-4 Modified Booth multiplier is designed, which is used iteratively in the architecture of dual-mode mantissa computation. Other key components of floating point division flow (such as leading-one-detection, left/right dynamic shifters, rounding, etc.) are also re-designed for the dual-mode operation. The proposed dual-mode architecture is synthesized using UMC 90nm technology ASIC implementation. Two versions of proposed architecture are presented, one with single stage multiplier and another with two stage multiplier. Compared to a standalone double precision division architecture, the proposed dual-mode architecture requires 17% to 19% extra hardware resources, with 3% to 5% period overhead. In comparison to prior art on this, the proposed architecture out-performs them in terms of required area, time-period and throughput.