Implementation of Floating-point Coprocessor

Abstract

This thesis presents the architecture and implementation of a high-performance floating-point coprocessor for Atmel's new microcontroller. The coprocessor architecture is based on a fused multiply-add pipeline developed in the specialization project, TDT4720. This pipeline has been optimized significantly and extended to support negation of all operands and single-precision input and output. New hardware has been designed for the decode/fetch unit, the register file, the compare/convert pipeline and the approximation tables. Division and square root is performed in software using Newton-Raphson iteration. The Verilog RTL implementation has been synthesized at 167 MHz using a 0.18 um standard cell library. The total area of the final implementation is 107 225 gates. The coprocessor has also been synthesized with the CPU. Test-programs have been run to verify that the coprocessor works correctly. A complete verification of the floating-point coprocessor, however, has not been performed due to limitations in time.