Low‐precision DSP‐based floating‐point multiply‐add fused for Field Programmable Gate Arrays.

Floating‐point (FP) multiply‐add fused (F1*F2±F3) and multiply‐accumulate represent the most common arithmetic operation in a wide range of applications, such as graphic processing, multimedia or FP digital signal processing (DSP). This study proposes FP multiply‐add fused units for low‐precision formats (IEEE 16‐bit half precision or the 32‐bit single precision) which rely on modern Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) features such as the available integer multiply‐accumulate‐based support built‐in the FPGA DSP blocks. These are employed as building‐blocks within the mantissa data‐path processing for the multiplication and the add/subtract operations. In order to use the DSP block for these operations, the alignment right shifts are performed before the multiply‐add stage: a right shift on the addend, and, a right shift for one of the multiplicands. This results in efficient DSP usage; thus both cost savings and higher performance (high working frequencies and low latencies) are obtained for the multiply‐add fused operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]