Floating Point support

[Ed J]

I writing VHDL for a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA application, and software for
its embedded PowerPC. The PowerPC doesn't have hardware floating point, and
floating point emulation in software is too slow for my purpose. So, I'm
looking for a way to add floating point in the FPGA fabric through VHDL or
black boxes. I need IEEE floating point operations such as add, subtract,
multiply, divide. I also need some math functions like sine, cosine, square
root, etc.

Is there a (free) standard package in VHDL that I can use for this? Third
party support?

I'm a newbie on a budget, so I'm looking for the cheapest, quickest
solution.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Ed.

 

[Glen Herrmannsfeldt]

"Ed J" <jed@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:fvyob.18006$YO5.8966216@news3.news.adelphia.net...

I writing VHDL for a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA application, and software
for
its embedded PowerPC. The PowerPC doesn't have hardware floating point,
and
floating point emulation in software is too slow for my purpose. So, I'm
looking for a way to add floating point in the FPGA fabric through VHDL or
black boxes. I need IEEE floating point operations such as add, subtract,
multiply, divide. I also need some math functions like sine, cosine,
square
root, etc.

Is there a (free) standard package in VHDL that I can use for this? Third
party support?

I'm a newbie on a budget, so I'm looking for the cheapest, quickest
solution.

I will guess that floating point in an FPGA is more expensive than in a
microprocessor.

How fast do you need, how fast are integer operations on your PPC, and how
fast are software floating point? There is a fair amount of extra work
needed for IEEE that isn't necessary for all users.

-- glen

 

[Peter Alfke]

IEE standard is nice, since it makes the results machine-independent.
But it also carries a large overhead in the size of mantissa and
exponent, and in all the special cases, like graceful underflow, that do
not concern the "normal" user.
Many users can live with the "big" step between 1 x 2 exp -128 and real zero...
The new FPGAs have fast 18 x 18 twos-complement multipliers that can
also be used as shifters, which makes the "bare" floating point
implementation less formidable than it used to be.
Peter Alfke
=================
Glen Herrmannsfeldt wrote:

"Ed J" <jed@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:fvyob.18006$YO5.8966216@news3.news.adelphia.net...
I writing VHDL for a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA application, and software
for
its embedded PowerPC. The PowerPC doesn't have hardware floating point,
and
floating point emulation in software is too slow for my purpose. So, I'm
looking for a way to add floating point in the FPGA fabric through VHDL or
black boxes. I need IEEE floating point operations such as add, subtract,
multiply, divide. I also need some math functions like sine, cosine,
square
root, etc.

Is there a (free) standard package in VHDL that I can use for this? Third
party support?

I'm a newbie on a budget, so I'm looking for the cheapest, quickest
solution.

I will guess that floating point in an FPGA is more expensive than in a
microprocessor.

How fast do you need, how fast are integer operations on your PPC, and how
fast are software floating point? There is a fair amount of extra work
needed for IEEE that isn't necessary for all users.

-- glen

 

[Ed J]

If I could get 100 nanosecond performance for a floating point multiply or
divide, I think that would be good enough. The math that my application
needs to perform isn't quite nailed down yet, but it involves signal
processing that will need complex multiplication, complex division, sine,
cosine, square root, etc. The performance goal of the system is to make
measurements at a 100 MHz rate, but it can be slower if cost becomes
prohibitive.

The PowerPC is rated for about 300 MHz, but the development board I am
currently using is running at only 100 MHz, and it takes a single cycle (10
nanoseconds) for an integer operation. At 100 MHz, an emulated floating
point addition operation takes about 48 microseconds, which is way too slow
to meet my performance specs.

Are there any high performance "floating point coprocessors" out there like
were used. The production quantity for our system will be very low, and
cannot justify a large expense for third-party IP, so we are willing to
consider an extra chip or two to do special work. For example, rather than
invest in Ethernet IP core for our FPGA, we mated it to a
commercially-available Ethernet MAC/PHY chip, and saved a lot on IP costs,
NRE, and FPGA internal real-estate.



"Glen Herrmannsfeldt" <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote in message
news:bUzob.71254$HS4.627308@attbi_s01...

"Ed J" <jed@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:fvyob.18006$YO5.8966216@news3.news.adelphia.net...
I writing VHDL for a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA application, and software
for
its embedded PowerPC. The PowerPC doesn't have hardware floating point,
and
floating point emulation in software is too slow for my purpose. So,
I'm
looking for a way to add floating point in the FPGA fabric through VHDL
or
black boxes. I need IEEE floating point operations such as add,
subtract,
multiply, divide. I also need some math functions like sine, cosine,
square
root, etc.

Is there a (free) standard package in VHDL that I can use for this?
Third
party support?

I'm a newbie on a budget, so I'm looking for the cheapest, quickest
solution.

I will guess that floating point in an FPGA is more expensive than in a
microprocessor.

How fast do you need, how fast are integer operations on your PPC, and how
fast are software floating point? There is a fair amount of extra work
needed for IEEE that isn't necessary for all users.

-- glen

 

[john jakson]

"Ed J" <jed@privacy.net> wrote in message news:<fvyob.18006$YO5.8966216@news3.news.adelphia.net>...

I writing VHDL for a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA application, and software for
its embedded PowerPC. The PowerPC doesn't have hardware floating point, and
floating point emulation in software is too slow for my purpose. So, I'm
looking for a way to add floating point in the FPGA fabric through VHDL or
black boxes. I need IEEE floating point operations such as add, subtract,
multiply, divide. I also need some math functions like sine, cosine, square
root, etc.

Is there a (free) standard package in VHDL that I can use for this? Third
party support?

I'm a newbie on a budget, so I'm looking for the cheapest, quickest
solution.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Ed.

Hi Ed

I was given these links recently,

http://www.quixilica.com/products_qxfpu.htm
http://www.nallatech.com/solutions/products/software_fpga_ip/fpga_ip/fpc/index.asp


http://www.dcd.pl/
http://www.opencores.org/projects/

opencores would be free, quixilica, nallatech probably aren't.

You could check out adding a lowcost DSP (TI,ADI,Zoran etc) or a
highend controller with FPU as coprocessor. I think the days of Weitek
math engines is long gone.

johnjaksonATusaDOTcom

 

[Jon Elson]

Ed J wrote:

I writing VHDL for a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA application, and software for
its embedded PowerPC. The PowerPC doesn't have hardware floating point, and
floating point emulation in software is too slow for my purpose. So, I'm
looking for a way to add floating point in the FPGA fabric through VHDL or
black boxes. I need IEEE floating point operations such as add, subtract,
multiply, divide. I also need some math functions like sine, cosine, square
root, etc.

Is there a (free) standard package in VHDL that I can use for this? Third
party support?

I'm a newbie on a budget, so I'm looking for the cheapest, quickest
solution.



In many applications, it doesn't make much sense to carry 32+ bits of

mantissa
when the original data was digitized by a 10 - 12 Bit ADC. When you have a
processor with that word-width built in, it makes no difference. But,
when you
are allocating resources on an FPGA, it may make a huge difference in real
estate consumed by the functions. As for Sine, Cos, etc. you may be
able to use
a look-up table for these. A 100 nS multiply is doable, but a 100 nS
sine or
sqrt may be a lot tougher. If the resolution is not too high, then the LUT
is both fast and can be done with a fast ram or rom.

You might want to look at all the DSP cores and other materials and
resources
that Xilinx has available.

Jon