As such, the leading bit is implicit and not stored as part of the significand. As we are using the binary system, this bit can only be 1. The leading bit – to the left of the radix point – is required to be non-zero.

The radix point is always placed after the first non-zero digit (e.g.

Normalization leads to two important points: The WB_FPU supports normalized floating-point numbers. The significand represents the precision bits of the number. For IEEE 754 single precision floats, the bias value used is 127. To facilitate both positive and negative exponent values, a bias value is added to the actual exponent to arrive at the 8-bit value that gets stored. This base is implicit and is therefore not stored as part of the 32-bit format. If this bit is '0', then the number is positive. If this bit is '1', then the number is negative. Figure 1 shows the composition of a binary floating-point number under this standard.įigure 1.

The WB_FPU supports single precision (32-bit) binary floating-point numbers, formatted in accordance with the IEEE 754 Standard. This standard not only specifies how floating-point numbers are to be represented, but also how arithmetic calculations on these numbers should be performed.

Before discussing the actual WB_FPU - Wishbone Floating Point Unit peripheral in detail, it is worth spending some time to look at the standard to which the floating-point numbers adhere, the IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-point Arithmetic (IEEE 754).

Altium circuitmaker