Design and implementation of fast floating point units for FPGAs

Abstract

Due to growth in demand for high-performance applications that require high numerical stability and accuracy, the need for floating-point FPGA has been increased. In this work, an open-source and efficient floating-point unit is implemented on a standard Xilinx Sparton-6 FPGA platform. The proposed design is described in a hierarchal way starting from functional block descriptions toward modules level design. Our implementation used minimal resources available on the targeting FPGA board, tested on Sparton-6 FPGA platform and verified on ModelSim. The open-source framework can be embedded or customized for low-cost FPGA devices that do not offer floating-point units.