High performance and energy efficient single‐precision and double‐precision merged floating‐point adder on FPGA

Abstract

A high performance and energy efficient single‐precision and double‐precision merged floating‐point adder based on the two‐path FP addition algorithm designed and implemented on field programmable gate array (FPGA) is presented. With a fully pipelined architecture, the proposed adder can accomplish one double‐precision addition or two parallel single‐precision additions in six clock cycles. The proposed architecture is designed based on the double‐precision adder and each major component is segmented to support dual single‐precision operations. In addition, all the components of the proposed adder are optimised for mapping on FPGA. The proposed architecture is implemented on both Altera Stratix‐III and Xilinx Virtex‐5 devices and it has a faster clock frequency when compared with the double‐precision intellectual property (IP) core adder provided by the FPGA vendors. Since the dual single‐precision operations support, the proposed adder has higher throughput compared with the single‐precision IP core adder. In addition, the proposed adder has better energy efficiency compared with both single‐precision and double‐precision IP core adder. The implementation results of the proposed adder on the latest Altera Arria‐10 and Xilinx Virtex‐7 devices are provided. A direct implementation of the proposed architecture on STM‐90 nm technology ASIC platform is also performed.