A family of high speed, floating point arithmetic chips

VLSI technology has been rapidly driving down the cost per function of digital signal processing. Indeed, the functions being built today in one box or one rack using modern IC´s would have been economically or physically impossible just a few years ago (i.e. 300MHZ, 1 million point real time FFT). This same technology has opened the door to larger, more complex, algorithms to solve bigger problems--such as image processing or voice recognition. These newer algorithms require in some cases greater precision, but more often, greater dynamic range in the calculations than that possible with the older fixed point machines. This paper describes four VLSI circuits needed to drive down the cost of high speed floating point arithmetic.