Control Design Precision with DesignWare Foundation Cores
By John Swanson, Product Line Manager, Synopsys
We interact with the electronic world by exchanging data via electronic systems. Much of the data being processed is analog in nature and needs to be accurately processed in the digital world. Consumers expect HD quality graphics, which require floating point precision. Consequently, many mathematical operations, often quite complex in nature and requiring floating point accuracy, are implemented in the SoC. Designers need to try different resolutions or transposing algorithms to meet their design objectives. Designers can control the precision of their designs and build custom operations with the new DesignWare Foundation Cores floating point library to meet their project objectives.
The DesignWare Foundation Cores floating point library utilizes the Flexible Floating Point (FFP) format developed by Dr. Alex Tenca at Synopsys. The library includes a robust set of atomic operators, compound operations, converters and components that can share stages of the FP operators. The flexible floating point components enable trading-off design accuracy for better QoR in designs that combine multiple floating point operations. To illustrate this, consider a baseline or simple multiplier compared to a fused or pre-built multiplier capable of handling multiple precisions. With DesignWare Foundation Cores, designers can explore the area and accuracy of the components to meet their design specific requirements, as shown in Figure 1.