Pipelining Of Double Precision Floating Point Division And Square Root Operations On Field-programmable Gate Arrays

Many space applications, such as vision-based systems, synthetic aperture radar, and radar altimetry rely increasingly on high data rate DSP algorithms. These algorithms use double precision floating point arithmetic operations. While most DSP applications can be executed on DSP processors, the DSP numerical requirements of these new space applications surpass by far the numerical capabilities of many current DSP processors. Since the tradition in DSP processing has been to use fixed point number representation, only recently have DSP processors begun to incorporate floating point arithmetic units, even though most of these units handle only single precision floating point addition/subtraction, multiplication, and occasionally division. While DSP processors are slowly evolving to meet the numerical requirements of newer space applications, FPGA densities have rapidly increased to parallel and surpass even the gate densities of many DSP processors and commodity CPUs. This makes them attractive platforms to implement compute-intensive DSP computations. Even in the presence of this clear advantage on the side of FPGAs, few attempts have been made to examine how wide precision floating point arithmetic, particularly division and square root operations, can perform on FPGAs to support these compute-intensive DSP applications. In this context, this thesis presents the sequential and pipelined designs of IEEE-754 compliant double floating point division and square root operations based on low radix digit recurrence algorithms. FPGA implementations of these algorithms have the advantage of being easily testable. In particular, the pipelined designs are synthesized based on careful partial and full unrolling of the iterations in the digit recurrence algorithms. In the overall, the implementations of the sequential and pipelined designs are common-denominator implementations which do not use any performance-enhancing embedded components such as multipliers and block memory. As these implementations exploit exclusively the fine-grain reconfigurable resources of Virtex FPGAs, they are easily portable to other FPGAs with similar reconfigurable fabrics without any major modifications. The pipelined designs of these two operations are evaluated in terms of area, throughput, and dynamic power consumption as a function of pipeline depth. Pipelining experiments reveal that the area overhead tends to remain constant regardless of the degree of pipelining to which the design is submitted, while the throughput increases with pipeline depth. In addition, these experiments reveal that pipelining reduces power considerably in shallow pipelines. Pipelining further these designs does not necessarily lead to significant power reduction. By partitioning these designs into deeper pipelines, these designs can reach throughputs close to the 100 MFLOPS mark by consuming a modest 1% to 8% of the reconfigurable fabric within a Virtex-II XC2VX000 (e.g., XC2V1000 or XC2V6000) FPGA

Design And Implementation Of Double Precision Floating Point Division And Square Root On Fpgas

This paper presents the sequential and pipelined designs of a double precision floating point divider and square root unit. The pipelining of these units is based on partial and full unrolling of the iterations in low-radix digit recurrence algorithms. These units are synthesized to produce common-denominator implementations that can be mapped on any FPGA chip regardless of architectural differences between the chips. The implementations of these designs show that their performances are comparable to, and sometimes higher than, the performances of non-iterative designs based on high radix numbers. While the iterative divider and square root unit occupy less than 1% of an XC2V6000 FPGA chip, their pipelined counterparts can produce throughputs that reach the 100 MFLOPS mark by consuming a modest 8% of the chip area. The pipelining of these iterative designs target high throughput computations encountered in some space applications. © 2006 IEEE

Pipelining Of Double Precision Floating Point Division And Square Root Operations

Space applications rely increasingly on high data rate DSP algorithms. These algorithms use double precision floating point arithmetic operations. While most DSP applications can be compiled on DSP processors, high data rate DSP computations require novel implementation technologies to support their high throughputs. Only recently, gate densities in FPGAs have reached a level which makes them attractive platforms to implement compute-intensive DSP applications. In this context, this paper presents the sequential and pipelined designs of a double precision floating point divider and square root unit on FPGAs. Contrary to pipelined parallel implementations, the pipelining of these units is based on unrolling the iterations in low-radix digit recurrence algorithms. These units are mapped on generic FPGA reconfigurable fabric without taking advantage of any advanced architectural components available in high capacity FPGAs. The implementations of these designs show that their performances are comparable to, and sometimes higher than, the performances of non-iterative designs based of high radix numbers. The iterative divider and square root unit occupy less than 1% of an XC2V6000 FPGA chip while their pipelined counterparts can produce throughputs that reach the 100 MFLOPS mark by consuming a modest 8% of the chip area

Comparison of bacterial contamination and antibacterial efficacy in bristles of charcoal toothbrushes versus noncharcoal toothbrushes: A microbiological study

Background: Charcoal toothbrushes have been marketed widely claiming lesser bacterial contamination owing to the presence of activated charcoal. Aim and Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the bacterial contamination and antimicrobial efficacy of charcoal bristles compared to noncharcoal bristles in used toothbrushes. Materials and Methods: A total of 50 patients met inclusion criteria which were given standard brushing instructions on the use of a charcoal toothbrush and were asked to return the used brushes after 1 week of usage. After a washout period of 1-week, the participants were then provided with noncharcoal toothbrush and given similar brushing instructions to both groups and were instructed to return the brush after another week of usage. Bristles of the used toothbrushes were sectioned and placed in a 5 ml of saline, and 0.1 ml was inoculated on blood agar plates, which were then placed in a gas pack jar for anaerobic culture. Colony forming units (CFU) were measured after 48 h of incubation. To evaluate the antibacterial efficacy of charcoal bristles, the zone of inhibition was evaluated for charcoal versus noncharcoal after 24 h of incubation. Data collected were analyzed using a paired sample t-test. Results: The mean CFU count for noncharcoal bristles was almost double that of charcoal bristles. About 10 mm of the zone of inhibition was found around charcoal bristles as compared to 3 mm for noncharcoal bristles. Conclusion: This study shows the statistically significant difference in bacterial counts between bristle types and lower CFUs in the charcoal bristles compared with noncharcoal bristles, after 1 week of use. The zone of inhibition that was found around charcoal tooth bristles supported the antimicrobial properties of the charcoal toothbrush