Integer and Floating-Point Constant Multipliers for FPGAs

Nicolas Brisebarre (1) , Florent de Dinechin (1) , Jean-Michel Muller (1)

1 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme

Reconfigurable circuits now have a capacity that allows them to be used as floating-point accelerators. They offer massive parallelism, but also the opportunity to design optimised floating-point hardware operators not available in microprocessors. Multiplication by a constant is an important example of such an operator. This article presents an architecture generator for the correctly rounded multiplication of a floating-point number by a constant. This constant can be a floating-point value, but also an arbitrary irrational number. The multiplication of the significands is an instance of the well-studied problem of constant integer multiplication, for which improvement to existing algorithms are also proposed and evaluated.

Mots clés: Computer arithmetic; Hardware operator; Constant multiplication; Floating-point

Domaines: Arithmétique des ordinateurs

Nicolas Brisebarre, Florent de Dinechin, Jean-Michel Muller. Integer and Floating-Point Constant Multipliers for FPGAs. International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors, 2008, IMEC, Jul 2008, Leuven, Belgium. pp.239-244, ⟨10.1109/ASAP.2008.4580184⟩. ⟨ensl-00269219⟩