Low cost floating-point unit design for audio applications

This paper presents a low-cost single-cycle floating-point unit developed for digital audio processing applications. In the unit, the serial steps of floating-point operations are paralleled to reduce critical path delay, and hardware resources are shared with the integer datapath to minimize area overhead. Its area overhead is as small as 38% of the fixed-point datapath, and the critical path delay is 6 ns in 0.25 μm CMOS technology, which makes it well suited to modern audio applications such as MP3 and AAC. The floating-point unit is verified through an efficient test vector generation method developed to reduce verification time significantly.