• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.48 no.10
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• pp.72-81
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• 2011

In this paper, we proposed and designed a novel floating point converter which supports single and double precisions of IEEE754 standard. The proposed convertor supports conversions between floating point number single/double precision and signed fixed point number(32bits/64bits) as well as conversions between signed integer(32bits/64bits) and floating point number single/double precision and conversions between floating point number single and double precisions. We defined a new internal format to convert various input types into one type so that overflow checking could be conducted easily according to range of output types. The internal format is similar to the extended format of floating point double precision defined in IEEE754 2008 standard. This standard specifies that minimum exponent bit-width of the extended format of floating point double precision is 15bits, but 11bits are enough to implement the proposed converting unit. Also, we optimized rounding stage of the convertor unit so that we could make it possible to operate rounding and represent correct negative numbers using an incrementer instead an adder. We designed single cycle data path and 5 cycles data path. After describing the HDL model for two data paths of the convertor, we synthesized them with TSMC 180nm technology library using Synopsys design compiler. Cell area of synthesis result occupies 12,886 gates(2 input NAND gate), and maximum operating frequency is 411MHz.