Low cost floating point arithmetic unit design

In this paper, we present the FP-AU (Floating Point Arithmetic Unit) that improves the performance of multimedia processing with low hardware cost. The hardware cost was minimized by designing a 32-bit single precision architecture that can execute 64-bit double precision operations with very low hardware overhead, such as a barrel shifter and control logics. Since the FP-AU occupies a significant amount of silicon area in a microprocessor due to double precision data, our proposed architecture shows a very efficient performance/cost ratio. The sticky bit generation logic offers a simple architecture that can reduce hardware cost. The FP-AU was modeled in Verilog HDL and synthesized with 0.35 /spl mu/m standard cell libraries after verification. The occupied area is about 6,590 equivalent gates. It operates at 130 MHz clock speed under worst-case conditions.