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. 30, 2003
Filed:
Jan. 04, 2000
Jeffrey A. Lohman, Plano, TX (US);
National Semiconductor Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
There is disclosed a pipelined floating point unit comprising: a) a first plurality of pipelined functional units for processing operands conforming to a single instruction-multiple data stream (SIMD) instruction set architecture (ISA); b) a second plurality of pipelined functional units for processing operands conforming to a scalar instruction set architecture (ISA); and c) a first format fault detection circuit associated with at least one of the first plurality of pipelined functional units for determining whether a first operand is a denormal number and, in response to the determination, generating a first fault signal. The first fault signal causes a number conversion circuit associated with the pipelined floating point unit to modify a significand and an exponent of at least one operand in a data register associated with the pipelined floating point unit to thereby convert the at least one operand to a denormal number.