Floating accumulator architecture

An Fpga-specific Approach to Floating-point Accumulation and Sum-of-products Lip Research Report Rr2008-22

This article studies two common situations where the flexibility of FPGAs allows one to design application-specific floating-point operators which are more efficient and more accurate than those offered by processors and GPUs. First, for applications involving the addition of a large number of floating-point values, an ad-hoc accumulator is proposed. By tailoring its parameters to the numerical...

Design-space exploration for the Kulisch accumulator

Floating-point sums and dot products accumulate rounding errors that may render the result very inaccurate. To address this, Kulisch proposed to use an internal accumulator large enough to cover the full exponent range of floating-point. With it, sums and dot products become exact operations. This idea failed to materialize in general purpose processors, as it was considered to slow and/or too ...

Performance Analysis of Floating Point MAC Unit

In order to meet the requirements in real time DSP applications MAC unit is required. The speed of the MAC unit determines the overall performance of the system. MAC unit basically consists of Multiplier, adder and an accumulator unit. In most of the cases floating point adder/subtractor and a multiplier are presented in IEEE-754 format for single precision format. In this research work MAC uni...

When FGPAs are better at floating-point than microprocessors

It has been shown that FPGAs could outperform high-end microprocessors on floating-point computations thanks to massive parallelism. However, most previous studies reimplement in the FPGA the operators present in a processor. This is a safe and relatively straightforward approach, but it doesn’t exploit the greater flexibility of the FPGA. This article is a survey of the many ways in which the ...

An Integrated Circuit Floating Point Accumulator