Floating Point Arithmetic Circuits

Abstract

Floating-point arithmetic in hardware still belongs to the more or less expensive extras of many types of computers. The algorism of floating point computation requires more circuits than the ordinary integer arithmetic circuits. A number of these circuits will be discussed in later sections of this chapter. Only parallel operating circuits will be treated. The hardware requirements of a floating point arithmetic unit follow from the algorism to be performed. This means that the various aspects of this algorism have to be discussed first.