A floating point multiplier performing IEEE rounding and addition in parallel

In the conventional floating point multipliers, the rounding stage is usually constructed by using a high speed adder for the increment operation, increasing the overall execution time and occupying a large amount of chip area. Furthermore, it may accompany additional execution time and hardware components for renormalization which may occur by an overflow from the rounding operation. A floating-point multiplier performing addition and IEEE rounding in parallel is designed by optimizing the operational flow based on the characteristics of floating point multiplication operation. A hardware model for the floating point multiplier is proposed and its operational model is algebraically analyzed in this research. The floating point multiplier proposed does not require any additional execution time nor any high speed adder for rounding operation. In addition, the renormalization step is not required because the rounding step is performed prior to the normalization operation. Thus, performance improvement and cost-effective design can be achieved by this approach.