A decimal floating-point fused multiply-add unit with a novel decimal leading-zero anticipator

There is a significant demand for decimal arithmetic, especially in commercial and financial applications. Furthermore, specifications for decimal floating-point (DFP) formats and arithmetic operations have been added to the IEEE-754-2008 Standard. Hardware and software support for DFP arithmetic operations have been investigated, especially in the last decade. This paper presents a novel DFP fused multiply-add (DFP-FMA) unit and a new decimal leading-zero anticipator (LZA). The DFP-FMA design uses a previously published parallel fixed-point decimal multiplier for multiplication and a Kogge-Stone parallel prefix adder for decimal addition. The DFP-FMA unit is synthesized using LSI Logic's gflxp 65-nm CMOS standard cell library. Synthesis results show that a 1.07-ns cycle time is obtained when the unit is synthesized with five pipeline stages. Furthermore, a new decimal LZA presented in this paper predicts zero-digit positions exactly and reduces the latency of the DFP-FMA operation. The correctness of the new decimal LZA is fully tested.