Hardware Design of a Binary Integer Decimal-based IEEE P754 Rounding Unit

Abstract

Because of the growing importance of decimal floating-point (DFP) arithmetic, specifications for it were recently added to the draft revision of the IEEE 754 Standard (IEEE P754). In this paper, we present a hardware design for a rounding unit for 64-bit DFP numbers (decimal 64) that use the IEEE P754 binary encoding of DFP numbers, which is widely known as the Binary Integer Decimal (BID) encoding. We summarize the technique used for rounding, present the theory and design of the BID rounding unit, and evaluate its critical path delay, latency, and area for combinational and pipelined designs. Over 86% of the rounding unit's area is due to a 55-bit by 54-bit binary multiplier, which can be shared with a double-precision binary floating-point multiplier. To our knowledge, this is the first hardware design for rounding IEEE P754 BID-encoded DFP numbers.