Abstract: A method and apparatus for operating on floating point numbers is provided that accepts two floating point numbers as operands in order to perform addition, a rounding adder circuit is provided which can accept the operands and a rounding increment bit at various bit positions. The circuit uses full adders at required bit positions to accommodate a bit from each operand and the rounding bit. Since the proper position in which the rounding bit should be injected into the addition may be unknown at the start, respective low and high increment bit addition circuits are provided to compute a result for both a low and a high increment rounding bit condition. The final result is selected based upon the most significant bit of the low rounding bit increment result. In this manner, the present rounding adder circuit eliminates the need to perform a no increment calculation used to select a result, as in the prior art.

Abstract: Apparatus and method for expediting the alignment of the fraction portion of operands in floating point operations. The alignment is performed in the arthmetic logic unit where the argument of the operand A exponent is subtracted from the argument of the operand B exponent. Because the result B-A can be a negative quantity, the result A-B can also be required. The arthmetic logic unit of the present invention provides additional apparatus for simultaneously determining B-A and A-B. The additional apparatus includes components in the propagate bit and generate bit cell for determining an auxiliary generate bit; an additional carry-chain array for combining the carry-in signal, the propagate bit and the auxiliary generate bit; and selection circuits for selecting the appropriate result.