FLOATING POINT ADDITION WITH EARLY SHIFTING

摘要

A floating point adder includes leading zero anticipation circuitry 18 to determine a number of leading zeros within a result significand value of a sum of a first floating point operand and a second floating point operand. This number of leading zeros is used to generate a mask which in turn selects input bits from a non-normalized significand produced by adding the first significand value and the second significand value. The non-normalized significand is then normalized at the same time as the output rounding bits used to round the normalized significand value are generated by rounding bit generation circuitry 40.