A parameterized floating-point exponential function for FPGAs

A parameterized floating point exponential operator is presented. In single precision, it uses a small fraction of the FPGA's resources and has a smaller latency than its software equivalent on a high-end processor, and ten times the throughput in pipelined version. Previous work had shown that FPGAs could use massive parallelism to balance the poor performance of their basic floating-point operators compared to the equivalent in processors. As this work shows, when evaluating an elementary function, the flexibility of FPGAs provides much better performance than the processor without even resorting to parallelism