18th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH '07)
Return of the hardware floating-point elementary function
Montpellier, France
June 25-June 27
ISBN: 0-7695-2854-6
The study of specific hardware circuits for the evaluation of floating-point elementary functions was once an active research area, until it was realized that these functions were not frequent enough to justify dedicating silicon to them. Research then turned to software functions. This situation may be about to change again with the advent of reconfigurable co-processors based on field-programmable gate arrays. Such co-processors now have a capacity that allows them to accomodate double-precision floating-point computing. Hardware operators for elementary functions targeted to such platforms have the potential to vastly outperform software functions, and will not permanently waste silicon resources. This article studies the optimization, for this target technology, of operators for the exponential and logarithm functions up to double-precision. These operators are freely available from www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/ Arenaire/.
Index Terms:
Floating-point elementary functions, hardware operator, FPGA, exponential, logarithm.
Citation:
Jeremie Detrey, Florent de Dinechin, Xavier Pujol, "Return of the hardware floating-point elementary function," arith, pp.161-168, 18th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH '07), 2007