Efficient implementation of a single-precision floating-point arithmetic unit on FPGA

Abstract

This paper presents a single precision floating point arithmetic unit with support for multiplication, addition, fused multiply-add, reciprocal, square-root and inverse square-root with high-performance and low resource usage. The design uses a piecewise 2nd order polynomial approximation to implement reciprocal, square-root and inverse square-root. The unit can be configured with any number of operations and is capable to calculate any function with a throughput of one operation per cycle. The floating-point multiplier of the unit is also used to implement the polynomial approximation and the fused multiply-add operation. We have compared our implementation with other state-of-the-art proposals, including the Xilinx Core-Gen operators, and conclude that the approach has a high relative performance/area efficiency.