Universal fused floating-point dot-product unit (UFDP)

A universal floating-point fused dot-product (UFDP) unit is presented that is capable of performing floating-point multiplication and addition or subtraction operations on two pairs of data, floating-point multiply add operation on three data items, floating-point multiplication of two data items and floating-point addition or subtraction of two data items. The proposed UFDP unit could be used as the only floating-point primitive a processor needs, where it easily can replace a floating-point adder, multiplier, fused multiply-add and a fused dot-product unit. Due to the dominance of multiply-add and dot-product operations in audio and video processing algorithms this unit can lead to substantial performance enhancement. The synthesis results using 32nm industry standard-cell library shows that the proposed architecture occupies an area of approximately twice a basic floating-point multiplier, can perform all operations in less 160% of a basic floating-point operation and consumes 80% more than a basic floating-point multiplier.