The design of a component to perform parallel addition of multiple floating-point (FP) operands is explored in this work. In particular, a 3-input FP adder is discussed in more detail, but the main concepts and ideas presented in this work are valid for FP adders with more inputs. The proposed design is more accurate than conventional FP addition using a network of 2-operand FP adders and it may have competitive area and delay depending on the number of input operands. Implementation results of a 3-operand FP adder are presented to compare its performance to a network of 2-input FP adders.
Alexandre F. Tenca