Bridged, Three-Path Fused Multiply-Adder

Introduction

Industry floating-point fused multiply-adders (FMA) to date all use a slight derivation of the original FMA serial architecture. Classically this architecture is subject to two major tradeoffs: 1) difficulty in implementation due to massive alignment and end-around-carry components?especially in the face of wire-dominant 65nm and smaller technologies; and 2) the floating-point unit (FPU) architecture faces both a loss of performance due to a reduction in parallel single instruction addition and multiplication capabilities as well as an increase in overall complication by switching to a three-operand datapath interface.

Benefits

• The Three-Path architecture reduces latency and power as compared to a classic FMA industrial unit by using mutually exclusive hardware paths that selectively power on and off based on the required arithmetic case.
  
• The Bridge architecture adds FMA capability to existing floating point units at a relatively low area cost and without forcing a reduction in the parallel instruction capabilities or needing a major overhaul of the entire FPU structure.

Market Potential/Applications

Processor design, floating-point design, computer architecture, 3D graphics, video processing, digital signal processing (DSP), computer arithmetic, computer division, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), transcendental calculation, multimedia applications.

For further information please contact

University of Texas,
Austin, USA
Website : www.otc.utexas.edu