High Speed Half-Precision Floating-Point Fused Multiply and Add Unit Using DSP Blocks

Necessity of multiplication followed by the addition in numerous digital signal processing applications demands Fused Multiply and Add (FMA) unit for computations. This FMA design performs [(A ×B) + C] computation as a single operation. The FPGA-based 16-bit half-precision FMA (fp16-FMA) design using in-built DSP blocks for performing integrated multiplication and addition is presented in this paper. The presented design is verified on Xilinx-FPGA Virtex-5 and Virtex-7 series and is compared with best reported 16-bit Floating-point FMA designs. The experimental results reveal that the new fp16-FMA achieves 67% delay reduction compared to Floating-Point Core (FloPoCo) generator-based FMA design. Finally, the amicability of the fp16-FMA in imaging is validated using image RGB to Y color space conversion.