Arbitrary Function Approximation in HDLs with Application to the N-body Problem

A module generator is described that allow.7 for the gen-eration of synthesizahle VHDL modules which implement arbitrary functions in fued point precision using the Sym-metric Table Addition Method (STM). This module gen-erator was interfaced to a high level synthesis tool “fly” which automatically generatesfully-pipelined circuits from a Perl-like language. The resulting system was applied to the N-body problem and results an! presented. It was found that afunction generator module is a very useful addition to a hardware description language