US 5,694,350 AGranted

Rounding adder for floating point processor

AssigneeDigital Equipment Corporation

InventorsGilbert M. Wolrich, Timothy C. Fischer, John A. Kowaleski, Jr.

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Abstract

A pipelined floating point processor including an add pipe for performing floating point additions is described. The add pipe includes a circuit to predict a normalization shift amount from examination of input operands, a circuit to determine the "Sticky bit" from the input operands, and a rounding adder which adds a pair of operands and rounds the result in a single pipeline stage operation. The rounding adder incorporates effects due to rounding in select logic for a series of carry select adders. The adder also aligns the datapath to permit economical storage and retrieval of floating point and integer operands for floating point or conversions operations. The floating point processor also includes in the adder pipeline a divider circuit include a quotient register having overflow quotient bit positions to detect the end of a division operation.

Claims7

Dependent claims

A rounding adder for floating point operations comprises:

means for providing generate, propagate and kill signals which indicate whether on a bit by bit basis that mantissa portions of a pair of input operands will generate, propagate or kill a carry for the respective bit position of the mantissa portions;
means for providing group propagate and group propagate kill signals from the generate, propagate and kill signals;
a carry-select adder fed by the generate, propagate and kill signals comprising:
a first set of adder sections coupled to input operands to be added with each of said first adder sections having no initial carry input;
a second set of adder sections coupled to said pair of input operands to be added with each of said second set of adder sections having an initial carry input;
means responsive to carry out signals from each of the adder sections for generating a signal indicating that all sections will propagate a carry;
control logic for generating select signals responsive to a carry out of a least significant bit adder section, the most significant bit (MSB) position of each last one of said first and second sets of adder sections, the group propagate and group kill signals, and a ALL.sub.-- PROP signal for each adder section indicating that a carry due to rounding would propagate through the respective section;
and
means, responsive to said select signals from the control logic, for selectively providing at an output thereof, results from selected ones of said adder sections in said first and second adder sets.

6 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.