@inproceedings{d578aeebe0664d898f58ebe5878e515f,
title = "Virtual floating-point units for low-power embedded processors",
abstract = "Floating-point (FP) arithmetic is becoming increasingly common in many embedded applications. Typically these applications execute in battery-powered, energy-constrained environments. Due to their tight area and power constraints, however, embedded processors often do not incorporate dedicated FP hardware. Instead, they only support fixed-point (FxP) arithmetic at the expense of considerably increased programming complexity and longer runtimes. In this paper, we propose low-overhead approaches to support FP arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, fused multiply-add) without incurring the high area and power penalties of dedicated FP hardware. Our approaches utilize the existing FxP execution resources in processors plus a small amount of additional hardware to support FP operations. Compared to a baseline processor with dedicated FP hardware, a processor with our approaches can reduce the area and power consumption by 24% and 31%, respectively. We also demonstrate that a processor using our approaches improves energy efficiency and performance by nearly 30%.",
keywords = "DSP, floating-point, low-power",
author = "Gilani, {Syed Zohaib} and Kim, {Nam Sung} and Michael Schulte",
year = "2012",
doi = "10.1109/ASAP.2012.28",
language = "English (US)",
isbn = "9780769547688",
series = "Proceedings of the International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
pages = "61--68",
booktitle = "Proceedings - 2012 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors, ASAP 2012",
address = "United States",
note = "2012 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors, ASAP 2012 ; Conference date: 09-07-2012 Through 11-07-2012",
}