Dual-Purpose Hardware Algorithms and Architectures – Part 1: Floating-Point Division

Division is a time-consuming, but frequently-used arithmetic operation, so an enormous amount of effort has been made to improve the performance of dividers. Most of the division algorithms in the literature are offline algorithms that minimize the execution time of a single division, whereas some others are online algorithms that maximize the throughput (# divisions executed per time). In this paper, we propose an interval-analysis-based normal-binary floating-point division algorithm that can be used for both offline and online division. We implement two offline and four online dividers using the algorithm and compare them with recently-proposed offline and online dividers. The simulation results show that the offline versions are the best for a Binary64 offline division, whereas the online versions are the best for a Binary64 online division.