Course abstract

Digital arithmetic plays an important role in the design of general-purpose digital processors and of embedded systems for signal processing, graphics, and communications. In spite of a mature body of knowledge in digital arithmetic, each new generation of processors or digital systems creates new arithmetic design problems. Designers, researchers, and graduate students will find solid solutions to these problems in this course. This course explains the fundamental principles of algorithms available for performing arithmetic operations on digital computers. These include basic arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in fixed-point and floating-point number systems as well as more complex operations such as square root extraction and evaluation of exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions. The algorithms described are independent of the particular technology employed for their implementation.