Low-latency double-precision floating-point division for FPGAs

Abstract

With growing FPGA capacities, applications requiring more intensive use of floating-point arithmetic become feasible candidates for acceleration using reconfigurable logic. Still among the more uncommon operations, however, are fast double-precision divider units. Since our application domain (acceleration of custom-compiled convex solvers) heavily relies on these blocks, we have implemented low-latency dividers based on the Goldschmidt algorithm that are accurate up to 1 bit of least precision (1-ULP). On Virtex-6 devices, our units operate at 200 MHz and significantly outperform other state-of-the-art 1-ULP dividers. We evaluate our blocks both stand-alone, as well as on the application-level when used for the high-level synthesis of the convex solver cores.