Date of Award

Fall 2012

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MSc)

Department

Computing and Software

Supervisor

Christopher K. Anand

Language

English

Committee Member

Franya Franek, Alan Wassyng

Abstract

A large number of scientific applications rely on the computing of logarithm. Thus, accelerating the speed of computing logarithms is significant and necessary. To this end, we present the realization of a pipelined Logarithm Computation Unit (LCU) in hardware that uses lookup table and interpolation techniques. The presented LCU supports single precision arithmetic with fixed accuracy and speed. We estimate that it can generate 2.9G single precision values per second under a 65nm fabrication process. In addition, the accuracy is at least 21 bits while lookup table size is about 7.776KB. To the best of our knowledge, our LCU achieves the fastest speed at its current accuracy and table size.

Comments

This thesis is funded by the IBM Center for Advanced Studies

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