A FPGA IEEE-754-2008 Decimal64 Floating-Point Multiplier

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a hardware module to calculate the decimal floating-point DFP) multiplication compliant with the current IEEE-754-2008 standard. The design proposed is made up of independent stages: IEEE-754 coder / decoder, decimal multiplier and rounding. The decimal multiplication is based on a previously designed BCD multiplier. The novelty is the design of a combinational and sequential architecture for rounding stage. Time performances and hardware requirements results are reported and evaluated. A decimal64 multiplication is able to be performed in 66 ns in a Virtex 4. The DFP multiplication presented supports operations on the decimal64 format and it is easily extendable for the decimal128 format. To the best of author’s knowledge, this is the first publication to present an IEEE 754-2008 multiplier in FPGA.