Dual-mode floating-point adder architectures

Most modern microprocessors provide multiple identical functional units to increase performance. This paper presents dual-mode floating-point adder architectures that support one higher precision addition and two parallel lower precision additions. A double precision floating-point adder implemented with the improved single-path algorithm is modified to design a dual-mode double precision floating-point adder that supports both one double precision addition and two parallel single precision additions. A similar technique is used to design a dual-mode quadruple precision floating-point adder that implements the two-path algorithm. The dual-mode quadruple precision floating-point adder supports one quadruple precision and two parallel double precision additions. To estimate area and worst-case delay, double, quadruple, dual-mode double, and dual-mode quadruple precision floating-point adders are implemented in VHDL using the improved single-path and the two-path floating-point addition algorithms. The correctness of all the designs is tested and verified through extensive simulation. Synthesis results show that dual-mode double and dual-mode quadruple precision adders designed with the improved single-path algorithm require roughly 26% more area and 10% more delay than double and quadruple precision adders designed with the same algorithm. Synthesis results obtained for adders designed with the two-path algorithm show that dual-mode double and dual-mode quadruple precision adders requires 33% and 35% more area and 13% and 18% more delay than double and quadruple precision adders, respectively.