Architecture of the NS32580 floating-point controller

The author describes the NS32580 floating-point controller, which, together with its companion device, Weitek's WTL 3164 floating-point data path, provides a high-performance floating point solution for high-end NS32532 based systems. The NS32580-WTL3164 with the NS32532 CPU executes single- and double-precision ADD, SUB, MUL, MACf with a peak throughput of 15 MFLOPS, keeping precise exception-handling. Using an improved slave protocol, the NS32580 interfaces between the NS32532 microprocessor and the WTL 3164 floating-point data path to form a software upwardly compatible floating-point unit.<>