Integer arithmetic is usually supposed to be good for some things but not for others – which need floating point arithmetic. In fact, for small machines, integer arithmetic might be all you need. In ...

but it isn’t and this doesn’t work. The reason is that the bit pattern is weighted by inverse powers of 2 and the bit pattern doesn’t correspond to the usual decimal values. A simple example will ...

If you are used to writing software for modern machines, you probably don’t think much about computing something like one divided by three. Modern computers handle floating point quite well. However, ...

Most low-end microprocessors (typical of embedded processors) do not provide hardware-assisted floating-point math. Microprocessor manufacturers unfortunately seem to feel that floating-point math is ...

I recently received an email announcement from Texas Instruments that linked to an archived discussion of floating-point and fixed-point math with John Thorn of Texas Instruments, David Anderson of ...

The development and implementation of controller designs up to this point have been based on double-precision floating-point mathematics in the MATLAB environment. Although it is sometimes possible to ...

Many numerical applications typically use floating-point types to compute values. However, in some platforms, a floating-point unit may not be available. Other platforms may have a floating-point unit ...

Hardware for integer or fixed-point arithmetic is relatively simple to design, at least at the register-transfer level. If the range of values and precision that can be represented with these formats ...

Recently Colin Walls had an article on this site about floating point math. Once it was common for embedded engineers to scoff at floats; many have told me they have no place in this space. That’s ...