Design Recipes for FPGAs, 2nd Edition

Chapter 23

Fixed Point Arithmetic

Abstract

In digital systems and HDLS such as VHDL or Verilog we have access to a range of types from bits and Booleans (which consist of two states 1 and 0, or true and false, respectively) which are effectively enumerated types, through integer numbers (including positive and natural subtypes) and eventually we can use real numbers (floating point). Unfortunately, the big drawback is not necessarily what we can use in a particular HDL, but rather what we can synthesize in hardware. In most cases it is still not possible to directly synthesize real numbers directly. Despite recent research efforts and standardization efforts, there is still a limited availability of packages and libraries that support both ...