Area-Efficient Arithmetic Expression Evaluation Using Deeply Pipelined Floating-Point Cores

Recently, it has become possible to implement floating-point cores on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to provide acceleration for the myriad applications that require high-performance floating-point arithmetic. To achieve high clock rates, floating-point cores for FPGAs must be deeply pipelined. This deep pipelining makes it difficult to reuse the same floating-point core for a series of dependent computations. However, floating-point cores use a great deal of area, so it is important to use as few of them in an architecture as possible. In this paper, the authors describe area-efficient architectures and algorithms for arithmetic expression evaluation.