On the Use of Continued Fractions for Digital Computer Arithmetic

Abstract

Recently, there has been some interest in the use of continued fractions for digital hardware calculations. We require that the coefficients of the continued fractions be integral powers of 2 and, therefore, well-known continued fraction expansions of functions cannot be used. Methods of expansion of a large number of functions are presented. We show that the problem of selection of coefficients of the continued fractions does not have practical solution in most of the cases we have considered.