A combined decimal and binary floating-point divider

In this paper, we present the hardware design of a combined decimal and binary floating-point divider, based on specifications in the IEEE 754-2008 Standard for Floating-point Arithmetic. In contrast to most recent decimal divider designs, which are based on the Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) encoding, our divider operates on either 64-bit binary encoded decimal floating-point (DFP) numbers or 64-bit binary floating-point (BFP) numbers. The division approach implemented in our design is based on a digit-recurrence algorithm. We describe the hardware resources shared between the two floating-point datatypes and demonstrate that hardware sharing is advantageous. Compared to a standalone DFP divider, the combined divider has the same worst case delay and 17% more area.