Intel Corporation

Bruce Ravenel

Rafi Nave

John F Palmer

A programmable bidirectional shifter is disclosed comprised of a first bidirectional load and read interface circuit selectively activated for left shifts, and a similarly constituted second bidirectional load and interface circuit which is selectively activated for right shifts. The first interface circuit is coupled to a byte shift matrix while the second interface circuit is coupled to a bit shift matrix. The byte shift matrix is arranged and configured to shift the input quantity by a multiple of bytes, namely multiples of eight bits. The bit shift matrix is similarly constituted to shift its input quantity by a selected number of bit locations up to seven consecutive places. The bit and byte shift matrices are coupled to allow bidirectional flow of signals therebetween. The bit and byte matrix are controlled by a bit and byte shift control circuit respectively which determines the number of bytes and bit places each matrix will actually shift.

Programmable bidirectional shifter

A floating point, integrated, arithmetic circuit is organized around a file format having a floating point numeric domain exceeding that of any single or double precision floating point numbers, long or short integer words of BCD data upon which it must operate. As a result the circuit has a greater reliability, range and precision than ever previously achieved without entailing additional circuit complexity. Reliability is further enhanced by a systematic three bit rounding field, and by including means for detecting every error or exception condition with an optional expected response provided thereto by hardware. As a result of such organization, an unexpected increase of capacity is achieved wherein transcendental functions can be computed totally in hardware, and whereby mixed mode arithmetic can be implemented without difficulty. The numeric processor also includes a programmable shifter capable of arbitrary numbers of bit and byte shifts in a single clock cycle, as well as an arithmetic unit capable of implementing multiplication, division, modulo reduction and square roots directly in hardware.

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Bruce Ravenel