The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 23, 1997
Filed:
Jul. 01, 1994
Peter Markstein, Woodside, CA (US);
Alan H Karp, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
A floating point arithmetic unit for correctly rounding a quotient or a square root of high precision numbers to the floating point number closest to the exact result is disclosed. The invention is generally applicable to round results to a precision greater than that provided by the floating point hardware. Prior to rounding, the hardware within the floating point unit produces a high precision mantissa with all but the last few digits correct. The rounding technique according to the invention is then used to produce a correctly rounded result using an enhanced Tuckerman test. Unlike a conventional Tuckerman test, the enhanced Tuckerman test determines the last few ULPs for both square root and division while checking for early termination. The advantage of checking for early termination is that the computation time needed to make the rounding decision can be significantly reduced.