Floating point dot product multiplier-accumulator

Abstract

A vector dot product multiplier receives a row vector and a column vector as floating point numbers in a format of sign plus exponent bits plus mantissa bits. The dot product multiplier generates a single dot product value by separately processing the sign bits, exponent bits, and mantissa bits in a few pipelined stages. A first pipeline stage generates a sign bit, a normalized mantissa formed by multiplying pairs multiplicand elements, and exponent information. A second pipeline stage receives the multiplied pairs of normalized mantissas, performs an adjustment, performs a padding, complement, and shift, and sums the results in an adder stage. The resulting integer is normalized to generate a sign bit, exponent, and mantissa of the floating point result.