Floating-point arithmetic provides a practical means of representing real numbers on digital computers by encoding them in a finite number of bits for sign, exponent and significand. The IEEE-754 ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Last month, I wrote about the hype ...

The arithmetic unit is one of the important components of CPU design. For computation of complex arithmetic functions on hardware, the CORDIC algorithm is an attractive fixed-point algorithm that uses ...

As defined by the IEEE 754 standard, floating-point values are represented in three fields: a significand or mantissa, a sign bit for the significand and an exponent field. The exponent is a biased ...

In 1985, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) established IEEE 754, a standard for floating point formats and arithmetic that would become the model for practically all FP ...

On February 25, 1991, during the eve of the of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a Scud missile fired from Iraqi positions hit a US Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A defense was available – ...

Embedded C and C++ programmers are familiar with signed and unsigned integers and floating-point values of various sizes, but a number of numerical formats can be used in embedded applications. Here ...

Although something that’s taken for granted these days, the ability to perform floating-point operations in hardware was, for the longest time, something reserved for people with big wallets. This ...

The term floating point is derived from the fact that there is no fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point; namely, the decimal point can float. There are also representations in ...