Electronic – Microcontrollers: Can I perform floating point operations in a Picoblaze controller

floating pointmicrocontrollerpicoblazexilinx

I wonder if I could perform floating point operations in a Picoblaze controller? Thank you to all posible answers with direct references to documentation or articles.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, I do not think that the Picoblaze has hardware support for floating-point. If it does, you can do it in hardware. Otherwise, you will need to do it in software emulation mode.

Since I noticed that you asked the same question for both the Picoblaze and the Microblaze, maybe you need to ask yourself why you need to do floating-point operations.

In many cases, there are alternatives to floating-point operations. Fixed-point operations are a common alternative to floating point. You will need to study your algorithms to determine if it is possible to represent the values in a fixed-point math alternative to floating-point math.

For example, if you use an 4-bit fixed-point width, you can represent values in quantums of 0.125 between -1.0 to 0.875 with fixed-point representation. Larger values can be scalar multiples of these values.

Edit: Article explaining float-to-fixed-point conversion.