The IBM zEnterprise-196 Decimal Floating-Point Accelerator

FPGA implementation of decimal processors for hardware acceleration

“…However, software operations run 100-1000 times slower than the corresponding binary operations implemented in hardware. For these reasons, in the revised IEEE standard 754 [5] support for decimal representation was added, and some companies are already commercializing processors which include decimal units [6], [7]. In this work, we show that we can accelerate with a decimal processor implemented on FPGA the accounting typically done by telephone companies.…”

Decimal Floating Point Number System

“…We will focus our attention here on designs using the conventional paradigm of CMOS digital gates although some alternative technologies [8,9] were also considered for decimal circuits at different points in time. Commercial hardware designs for decimal floating point additions were pioneered by IBM [10][11][12], followed by SilMinds [6,[13][14][15], then Fujitsu [16]. All of these commercial implementations use DPD.…”

“…Current commercial implementations of decimal floating point arithmetic are in servers [10][11][12]16] mainly targeting the financial sector. In the future, with the wider adoption of the ideas inherent in smart grids and the Internet-of-Things where many devices may communicate and conduct some financial transactions on behalf of their owners we might see more dedicated hardware for decimal in such embedded systems.…”

High-frequency sequential decimal multipliers

“…The proposed design is synthesized and compared with the previous fastest work [8] in terms of the latency and area. It should be mentioned that although there are miscellaneous designs and architectures proposed for the sequential decimal multipliers (e.g., [3], [4] and [9]), we decided to pick up [8] as the reference for comparison since this is the fastest available in the literature.…”

“…The continuous growth of decimal FP arithmetic is gathering pace such that processors, nowadays, include special hardware accelerators for decimal FP arithmetic [3]. These units usually perform decimal addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in hardware, among which the latter two operations are the most complicated.…”