Design and Implementation of a Modular and Portable IEEE 754 Compliant Floating-Point Unit

Multimedia and communication algorithms from embedded system domain often make extensive use of floating-point arithmetic. Due to the complexity and expense of the floating-point hardware, final implementations of these algorithms are usually carried out using floating-point emulation in software, or conversion (manually or automatically) of the floating-point operations to fixed point operations. Such strategies often lead to semi-optimal and imprecise software implementation. This paper presents the design and implementation of a floating-point unit (FPU) for an application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) suitable for embedded systems domain. Using a state-of-the-art architecture description language (ADL) based ASIP design framework, the FPU is implemented in such a modular way that it can be easily adapted to any other RISC like processor. The implemented operations are fully compliant to the IEEE 754 standard which facilitates portable software development. The benchmarking, in terms of energy, area and speed, of the designed FPU highlights the trade-offs of having a hardware FPU w.r.t. software emulation of floating-point operations