An Autonomous Vector/Scalar Floating Point Coprocessor for FPGAs

We present a Floating Point Vector Coprocessor that works with the Xilinx embedded processors. The FPVC is completely autonomous from the embedded processor, exploiting parallelism and exhibiting greater speedup than alternative vector processors. The FPVC supports scalar computation so that loops can be executed independently of the main embedded processor. Floating point addition, multiplication, division and square root are implemented with the Northeastern University VFLOAT library. The FPVC is parameterized so that the number of vector lanes and maximum vector length can be easily modified. We have implemented the FPVC on a Xilinx Virtex 5 connected via the Processor Local Bus (PLB) to the embedded PowerPC. Our results show more than five times improved performance over the PowerPC augmented with the Xilinx Floating Point Unit on applications from linear algebra: QR and Cholesky decomposition.