Design and evaluation of a floating-point division operator based on CORDIC algorithm

Design and evaluation of a CORDIC (COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer) algorithm for a floating-point division operation is presented in this paper. In general, division operation based on CORDIC algorithm has a limitation in term of the range of inputs that can be processed by the CORDIC machine to give proper convergence and precise division operation result. A hardware architecture of CORDIC algorithm capable of processing broader input ranges is implemented and presented in this paper by using a pre-processing and a post-processing stage. The performance as well as the calculation error statistics over exhaustive sets of input tests are evaluated. The results show that the CORDIC algorithm can be well-convergence and gives precise division operation results with broader input ranges. The proposed hardware architecture is modeled in VHDL and synthesized on a CMOS standard-cell technology and a FPGA device, resulting 1 GFlops on the CMOS and 210.812 MFlops on the FPGA device.