A 64-bit Decimal Floating-Point Comparator

Decimal arithmetic is growing in importance as scientific studies reveal that current financial and commercial applications spend a high percentage overhead in this type of calculations. Typically, software is utilized to emulate decimal floating point arithmetic in these applications. On the other hand, functional units that employ decimal floating point hardware can improve performance by two or three orders of magnitude. This paper presents the design and implementation of a novel decimal floating-point comparator compliant with the current draft revision of the IEEE-754 Standard for floating-point arithmetic. It utilizes a novel BCD magnitude comparator with logarithmic delay and it supports 64- bit decimal floating-point numbers. Area and delay results are examined for an implementation in TSMC SCN6M SCMOS technology.