Efficient hardware implementations of decimal floating-point arithmetic unit

最近，许多商业应用对十进制算术运算的需求很大，包括金融分析、税务计算、电话计费、货币兑换、基于互联网的应用程序和电子商务。因此，十进制算术运算的规范最近被添加到电气和电子工程师协会(IEEE)754浮点算术标准的未经批准的草案(截至2006年10月)中。硬件中的二进制浮点运算可以处理十进制算术密集型应用，但十进制数据可以用十进制运算单元更准确地表示。由于许多十进制数不能准确地用二进制表示，因此需要以十进制格式存储数据并使用十进制算术软件处理数据。即使十进制浮点算术软件消除了转换错误，众所周知，十进制浮点软件通常比在硬件中实现的二进制浮点慢100到1000倍。因此，需要十进制浮点算术的硬件实现。本研究将研究十进制浮点运算单元的高效硬件实现。这一研究结果将显著提高许多商业应用的性能和准确性。

Recently, there are significant demands for decimal arithmetic operations for many commercial applications, including financial analysis, tax calculation, phone billing, currency conversion, Internet based applications, and e-commerce. Consequently, specifications for decimal arithmetic operations have recently been added to the unapproved draft (as of Oct. 2006) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 754 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic. Binary floating-point arithmetic in hardware can handle decimal arithmetic-intensive applications, but decimal data can be more accurately represented by a decimal arithmetic unit. Since many decimal numbers cannot be exactly represented in binary, it is desirable to store data in a decimal format and process data using decimal arithmetic software. Even if decimal floating-point arithmetic software eliminates conversion errors, it is known that decimal floating-point software is typically 100 to 1,000 times slower than binary floating-point implemented in hardware. Therefore, there is need for hardware implementations of decimal floating-point arithmetic. Efficient hardware implementations of decimal floating-point arithmetic unit will be studied in this proposed research. The result of this research will improve the performance and the accuracy of many commercial applications significantly.