Analysis of floating point operations in microcontrollers

Author

Ramakrishnan, Aswin ; Conrad, James M.

Author_Institution

PIM TEC, Denver, CO, USA

fYear

2011

fDate

17-20 March 2011

Firstpage

97

Lastpage

100

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify the advantages of including a floating point hardware / a mathematical co-processor in microcontrollers used for critical floating point operations. Three different microcontrollers are considered: Renesas M16C/62P (CISC without FPU), ATMEGA1280 (RISC without MCU) and Renesas RX62N (CISC with FPU). Gauss-Seidel and Jacobi iterations for a system of 2 and 3 variables using single precision and double precision floating point numbers are implemented. The time taken by each microcontroller is measured using the Timer in the microcontrollers. Based on the time taken, the advantages of the inclusion of the floating point unit are attributed against the cost incurred by the hardware.

Keywords

coprocessors; iterative methods; microcontrollers; reduced instruction set computing; ATMEGA1280; CISC; Gauss-Seidel iterations; Jacobi iterations; RISC; Renesas M16C-62P; Renesas RX62N; double precision floating point numbers; mathematical coprocessor; microcontrollers; single precision precision floating point numbers; Clocks; Hardware; Iterative methods; Jacobian matrices; Matrix decomposition; Microcontrollers; Time frequency analysis; ATMEGA1280; FPU; Gauss-Seidel; Jacobi; M16C/62P; RX62N; Timer;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Southeastcon, 2011 Proceedings of IEEE

Conference_Location

Nashville, TN

ISSN

1091-0050

Print_ISBN

978-1-61284-739-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SECON.2011.5752913

Filename

5752913