Performing Floating-Point Accumulation on a Modern FPGA in Single and Double Precision

In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of a floating-point accumulator (FPACC) on modern high-end FPGA devices. We explore different implementation scenarios and propose new FPACC architectures for both single and double precision floating-point addends. The proposed strategies can be easily adapted to the implement a multiply-accumulator (FPMAC), with one or two rounding stages, in both single and double precision as well. All the aforementioned designs are characterized by high operating frequencies (ranging from 130 to 300 MHz) and moderate occupation area (from 300 to 800 slices) when implemented on the VC5VSX50T FPGA, an entry level Virtex 5 from Xilinx.