Low cost floating-point unit design for audio applications

This paper presents a low-cost, single-cycle floating-point unit developed for digital audio processing applications. In the unit, the serial steps of floating-point operations are paralleled to reduce critical path delay, and hardware resources are shared with the integer datapath to minimize area overhead. Its area overhead is as small as 38% of the fixed-point datapath, and the critical path delay is 6ns in 0.25µm CMOS technology, which makes it well suited to modern audio applications such as MP3 and AAC. The floating-point unit is verified through an efficient test vector generation method developed to reduce verification time significantly.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ISCAS
• Authors: Sung-Won Lee, In-Cheol Park
• Keywords: Critical Path Delay, Floating-point Unit, Hardware, ISCAS 2002, Single-cycle Floating-point Unit