High performance reconfigurable architecture for double precision floating point division

Abstract

Floating point arithmetic (FPA) are very crucial and critical domain for the hardware acceleration. FPA are widely used in the vast field of application. The division operation of the FPA is a very intensive operation, in terms of complexity, area requirement and performance speed. This paper presents an efficient FPGA implementation of double-precision FPA divisions on Virtex-2pro FPGA platform, for the ease of comparing with prior works. The proposed method is based on the method of binomial expansion, which uses look-up tables and partial block multipliers (PBM). Compared with previously reported work, the proposed design occupies smaller area (in terms of number slices, number of multipliers and the BRAM usage) with a higher performance gain and less latency. By using over 5 million unique random test cases, our results show that the proposed design gives an average error of less than 0.5 ULP (unit at last place), and a maximum error of 2 ULP without using any rounding scheme. However, rounding can also be added to the design to restore some accuracy at a slight cost in area. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.