An Asynchronous IEEE-754-standard Single-precision Floating-point Divider for FPGA

Abstract

Synchronous design methodology is widely used for today's digital circuits. However, it is difficult to reuse a highly-optimized synchronous module for a specific clock frequency to other systems with different global clocks, because logic depth between FFs should be tailored for the clock frequency. In this paper, we focus on asynchronous design, in which each module works at its best performance, and apply it to an IEEE-754-standard single-precision floating-point divider. Our divider is ready to be built into a system with arbitrary clock frequency and achieves its peak performance and area- and power-efficiency. This paper also reports an implementation result and performance evaluation of the proposed divider on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA. The evaluation results show that our divider achieves smaller area and lower power consumption than the synchronous dividers with comparable throughput.