ALOHA-FP2I: Efficient Algorithms and Hardware for Multi-Mode Rounding of Floating Point to Integer

Abstract

Modern technology is relying on hardware accelerators to achieve enhanced performance of computing systems. In the modern computing paradigm, floating point representation of numbers has gained popularity owing to its wide dynamic range. Rounding of floating point numbers to integer is used in modern processor architectures e.g., ARM and Intel's architecture (IA) as well as in specific applications such as multimedia. However, the academic literature lacks discussion on hardware designs for rounding binary floating point numbers to integer in different rounding modes. This article presents novel efficient algorithms and hardware architecture designs for rounding binary floating point numbers to the integer for the following rounding modes: round towards zero, round up (towards positive infinity), round down (towards negative infinity), round to the nearest integer, and round to nearest even. The article also proposes an integrated multi-mode rounding (IMR) algorithm and hardware design which can be configured to a specific rounding mode among the above-mentioned five modes. This article proposes a mantissa bit of rounding (MBR) to determine the condition of rounding for the various modes. The MBR is identified on the basis of the dynamic range and precision features of floating point representation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the individual as well as an integrated hardware design for the various rounding modes for the first time in the literature. The proposed designs have been implemented on an FPGA platform to analyze the design metrics such as area, delay, and power. The results imply that the proposed designs are suitable to aid the intended hardware accelerators as they are efficient in terms of the design parameters. Moreover, this article presents the integration of the proposed rounding hardware design with the compression processor and evaluates the integration overhead which is found to be nominal (<1%).