Q-Format number representation

Lecture 5 Fixed Point vs Floating Point

N-bit fixed point, 2s complement number is given by:
x = bN 1 2 N 1 + bN 2 2 N 2 + + b1 21 + b0 20

Objectives:

N-1

Understand fixed point representations

Understand scaling, overflow and rounding in fixed point
Understand Q-format
Understand TMS320C67xx floating point representations
Understand relationship between the two in C6x architecture

S
imaginary
binary point

Difficult to work with due to possible overflow & scaling problems

Often normalise number to some fractional representation (e.g.
between 1)
x = bN 1 20 + bN 2 2 1 + + b1 2 N 2 + b0 2 N 1

Reference: "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point

Arithmetic" by David GoldbergACM Computing Surveys 23, 5 (March 1991).

N-1

S
imaginary
binary point

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5-1

Q-format notation
Q-format representation:
if N=16, 15 bit fractional representation

Rule:
Q m + Qm
Qm x Q n

Q
Q

Storing Q30 number to 16-bit memory requires rounding or

truncation:

Q15 format

31

Q30

Q15

16

00

0000

0000

0000

Rounding:

if r = 0, round down,
r = 1, round up

15

r
rounding by addition a '1' here

16

15

31

Q30

m+n

15

5-2

How to store Q30 number to 16-bit memory?

Assume 16-bit data format, Q15 x Q15 Q30

Q15

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

MPY A3,A4,A6
NOP
ADDK 4000h,A6
SHR A6,15,A6
STH A6,*A7

; A3 x A4 A6
; Delay slot
; rounding add
; truncate bottom 15 bits
; A6 mem[A7]

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5-3

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5-4

Avoid overflow with SADD

Safe add routine in C to avoid overflow

SADD - saturation add instruction

Always clip to max (or min) possible
Set bit 9 of the CSR register to indicate saturation has occurred

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5-5

Single Precsion Floating Point number

single
precision

23 22

8-bit exp

64-bit double precision floating point:

31 30

double
precision

23-bit frac

20 19

11-bit exp

Odd register (e.g. A5)

x = 1s 2 exp 127 1. frac

0 31

52-bit frac
Even register (e.g. A4)

x = 1s 2 exp 1023 1. frac

1.175 1038 < x < 1.7 1038

2.2 10308 < x < 1.7 10308

MSB is sign-bit (same as fixed point)

8-bit exponent in bias-127 integer format (i.e., add 127 to it)
23-bit to represent only the fractional part of the mantissa. The
MSB of the mantissa is ALWAYS 1, therefore it is not stored

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5-6

Double Precision Floating Point number

Easy (and lazy) way of dealing with scaling problem

32-bit single precision floating point:
31 30

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

MSB is sign-bit (same as fixed point)

11-bit exponent in bias-1023 integer format (i.e., add 1023 to it)
52-bit to represent only the fractional part of the mantissa. The
MSB of the mantissa is ALWAYS 1, therefore it is not stored

5-7

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5-8

Examples

Problems of Q-format

Convert 5.75 to SP FP

Wrong Q-format representation will give totally wrong results

Even correct use of Q-format notation may reduce precision
For this example, Q12 result is totally wrong, and Q8 result is
imprecise:

22

5.75 to binary: +1.01110000... x

exponent in bias-127 is 127+2 = 129 = 1000 0000b
The fractional part is .01110000... after we drop the hidden 1 bit.
Answer: 0 10000001 0111000 00...00 = 40B80000 (hex)

Convert 0.1 to DP FP
0.1 to binary: 1.10011001(1001 repeats) x 2-4
exponent in bias-1023 is 1023-4 = 1019 = 011 1111 1011b
The fractional part is .10011001...1010 after we drop the hidden 1 bit and
rounding
Answer: 0 01111111011 1001100 ...1001 1010 = 3FB9 9999 9999 999A
(hex).

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5-9

Q12 7.50195
Q12 7.25
Q24 54.38916

0111. 1000 0000 1000

* 0111. 0100 0000 0000
0110 0110. 0110 0011 1010 0000 0000 0000
Q12 6.38916
Q8 54.38281

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

Data types used by C6x DSPs

5 - 10

Special SP numbers
IEEE floating point standard has a set of special numbers:
Special
value
+0
-0
1
2
+Inf
-Inf
NaN
LFPN
SFPN

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5 - 11

Sign (s)
0
1
0
0
0
1
x
0
0

Exponent
(e)
0
0
127
128
255
255
255
254
1

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

Fraction
(f)
0
0
0
0
0
0
Nonzero
All 1s
All 0s

Hex
Value

Decimal
value

0x0000 0000

0.0
-0.0
1.0
2.0
+
-
not a number
3.40282347 e+38
1.17549435e-38

0x8000 0000
0x3F80 0000
0x4000 0000
0x7F80 0000
0xFF80 0000
0x7FFF FFFF
0x7F7F FFFF
0x0080 0000

5 - 12

Special DP numbers

TMS320C67x Internal System Architecture

Double precision floating point special numbers:

Fraction
(f)
0
0
0
0
0
0
Nonzero
All 1s
All 0s

Hex
Value

Decimal
value

P
E
R
I
P
H
E
R
A
L
S

External
Memory

0x0000 0000 0000 0000

0.0

0x8000 0000 0000 0000

-0.0

0x3FF0 0000 0000 0000

1.0

0x4000 0000 0000 0000

2.0

0x7FF0 0000 0000 0000

0xFFF0 0000 0000 0000

0x7FFF FFFF FFFF FFFF

-
not a number

0x7FEF FFFF FFFF FFFF

1.7976931348623157 e+308

0x0010 0000 0000 0000

2.2250738585072014 e-308

Internal Buses

.D1 .D2
.M1 .M2
.L1 .L2
.S1 .S2

Regs (B0-B15/31)

Exponent
(e)
0
0
1023
1024
2047
2047
2047
2046
1

Regs (A0-A15/31)

Special
value
+0
-0
1
2
+Inf
-Inf
NaN
LFPN
SFPN

Internal
Memory

CPU
Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5 - 13

Four functional units for each datapath

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5 - 14

Mapping of instructions to functional units

.S Unit

.S
.L
.D
.M

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

5 - 15

ADD
ADDK
ADD2
AND
B
CLR
EXT
MV
MVC
MVK
MVKH

NEG
NOT
OR
SET
SHL
SHR
SSHL
SUB
SUB2
XOR
ZERO

ABSSP
ABSDP
CMPGTSP
CMPEQSP
CMPLTSP
CMPGTDP
CMPEQDP
CMPLTDP
RCPSP
RCPDP
RSQRSP
RSQRDP
SPDP

.D Unit
ADD
NEG
ADDAB (B/H/W) STB
(B/H/W)
LDB
(B/H/W) SUB
LDDW
SUBAB (B/H/W)
MV
ZERO

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

.L Unit
ABS
ADD
AND
CMPEQ
CMPGT
CMPLT
LMBD
MV
NEG
NORM

NOT
OR
SADD
SAT
SSUB
SUB
SUBC
XOR
ZERO

MPY
MPYH
MPYLH
MPYHL

SMPY
SMPYH

ADDSP
ADDDP
SUBSP
SUBDP
INTSP
INTDP
SPINT
DPINT
SPRTUNC
DPTRUNC
DPSP

.M Unit
MPYSP
MPYDP
MPYI
MPYID

No Unit Used
NOP

IDLE
5 - 16

Detailed internal datapaths

Data
path A

Lecture 5 - Fixed point vs Floating point

Data
path B

5 - 17