Process for a floating point dot product multiplier-accumulator

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-11893360-B2
Application number	US-202117180856-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Feb 21, 2021
Priority date	Feb 21, 2021
Publication date	Feb 6, 2024
Grant date	Feb 6, 2024

Abstract

A process for performing vector dot products receives a row vector and a column vector as floating point numbers in a format of sign plus exponent bits plus mantissa bits. The process generates a single dot product value by separately processing the sign bits, exponent bits, and mantissa bits to form a sign bit, a normalized mantissa formed by multiplying pairs multiplicand elements, and exponent information including MAX_EXP and EXP_DIFF. A second pipeline stage receives the multiplied pairs of normalized mantissas, optionally performs an exponent adjustment, pads, complements and shifts the normalized mantissas, and the results are added in a series of stages until a single addition result remains, which is normalized using MAX_EXP to form the floating point output result.

First claim

I claim:

1. A process for a pipelined floating point multiplier-accumulator (MAC) computing a floating point result from N floating point pairs, each floating point pair comprising a floating point input and a floating point coefficient, the process comprising:
a maximum exponent controller determining a maximum exponent (MAX_EXP) value from among the N floating point pairs, the MAX_EXP value comprising a maximum sum value of an exponent of a floating point input and a corresponding exponent of a floating point coefficient;
a dot product controller for each of the associated N floating point pairs performing a process of:
generating a sign bit output from an exclusive OR (XOR) operation performed with an XOR gate on a sign bit of a corresponding floating point input and a sign bit of a corresponding floating point coefficient;
generating a normalized mantissa by the dot product controller performing a multiplication of a mantissa of a corresponding floating point input with a mantissa of a corresponding floating point coefficient, and asserting an exponent increment (EXP_INC) bit when the multiplication generates a result with a most significant bit of 1;
generating an exponent difference (EXP_DIFF) value by subtracting a sum of an exponent of the corresponding floating point input and an exponent of the corresponding floating point coefficient from MAX_EXP;
when the EXP_DIFF value is 0 and the EXP_INC bit is asserted, incrementing MAX_EXP and asserting a maximum increment (MAX_INC) bit to other dot product controllers generating a respective normalized mantissa;
when the EXP_DIFF value is not 0 and the EXP_INC bit is not asserted and the MAX_INC bit is asserted, incrementing the EXP_DIFF value;
when the EXP_DIFF value is not 0 and the EXP_INC bit is asserted and the MAX INC bit is not asserted, decrementing the EXP_DIFF value;
performing a padding step of pre-pended the normalized mantissa with at least one 0, performing a complement step of replacing a result of the padding step with a 2's complement of the result of the padding step if a corresponding sign bit output is 1, performing a shift step using a shift register which shifts the result of the complement step to the right by a number EXP_DIFF of bit positions and outputting a shifted result as an integer form fraction;

accumulating N integer form fractions to generate an adder output;
generating a floating point output by converting the adder output to a resulting sign bit and a resulting normalized mantissa derived from the adder output, thereafter outputting the resulting sign bit, an exponent derived from MAX_EXP, and the resulting normalized mantissa.

2. The process of claim 1 where at least one of the floating point inputs, the floating point coefficients, and the floating point output conforms to at least one of the formats: bfloat, FP16, and FP32 of an IEEE standard 754.

3. The process of claim 1 where the process is operative on multiple pipeline stages.

4. The process of claim 1 where the process is operative on a first pipeline stage and a second pipeline stage which has registered inputs receiving values from the first pipeline stage.

5. The process of claim 4 where the first pipeline stage and second pipeline stage operate in parallel on the N pairs simultaneously.

6. The process of claim 4 where the first pipeline stage and second pipeline stage operate sequentially on each of the N pairs.

7. A process for a pipelined floating point multiplier-accumulator (MAC) implemented with registers separating stages and configured to generate a sum of N products from a corresponding pair of values, each pair of values comprising a floating point input value and a corresponding floating point coefficient value, the process comprising:
each of the N products provided by a dot product controller performing a respective dot product process of:
outputting a sign bit computed from an exclusive OR (XOR) of a sign bit of a floating point input value with a sign bit of a corresponding floating point coefficient value;
computing an exponent sum of an exponent of the floating point input value with an exponent of the corresponding floating point coefficient, determining a maximum exponent (MAX_EXP) value from all N exponent sums, determining an exponent difference (EXP_DIFF) value between the MAX_EXP value and the corresponding exponent sum;
generating a product by multiplying a mantissa from the floating point input value with a mantissa from the corresponding floating point coefficient value and normalizing the product, and asserting an exponent increment (EXP_INC) bit if an overflow results from the multiplication;
when the EXP_DIFF value is 0 and the EXP_INC bit is asserted, incrementing MAX_EXP and asserting a maximum increment (MAX_INC) bit;
when the EXP_DIFF value is not 0 and the EXP_INC bit is not asserted and the MAX_INC bit is asserted, incrementing the EXP_DIFF value;
when the EXP_DIFF value is not 0 and the EXP_INC bit is asserted and the MAX_INC bit is not asserted, decrementing the EXP_DIFF value;
prepending and appending 0 values to the normalized product to generate a padded value, modifying the padded value by taking a two's complement of the padded value if the sign bit is 1, thereafter right shifting the result by the EXP_DIFF value to generate an integer form fraction;

a summing process receiving each of the N integer form fractions and outputting an integer form fraction sum;
converting the integer form fraction sum to a resulting sign bit and resulting normalized mantissa, and outputting a floating point output value comprising the resulting sign bit, an exponent derived from said MAX_EXP value, and the resulting normalized mantissa.

8. The process of claim 7 where a first pipeline stage outputs a sign bit, a normalized mantissa, the EXP_INC bit, MAX_EXP, and the EXP_DIFF value to a second pipeline stage having a registered input.

9. The process of claim 8 where the second pipeline stage generates N integer form fractions.

10. The process of claim 7 where each floating point input value comprises, in sequence, a sign bit, 8 bits of exponent, and 7 bits of mantissa.

11. The process of claim 7 where outputting an integer form fraction comprises N/2 add operations in parallel in a first stage, the N/2 add operations having a bit width equal to a number of bits of the integer form fraction sum.

12. The process of claim 7 where prepending 0 values comprises prepending at least log 2 N 0s.

13. The process of claim 7 , where if more than one said EXP_DIFF value equals 0, the MAX_INC bit is asserted and MAX EXP is only incremented once.

14. The process of claim 7 where the MAX_INC bit from a process with the EXP_DIFF value equal to 0 is provided to processes where the EXP_DIFF value is not equal to 0.

15. The process of claim 7 where the integer form fraction has a bit width in a range of 16 to 32 bits.

16. The process of claim 7 where the floating point input values have a format conforming to IEEE standard 754.

17. A process for a pipelined floating point multiplier-accumulator (MAC) receiving N pairs of floating point values, each pair comprising a floating point input and a floating point coefficient, each floating point input and floating point coefficient comprising a sign bit, a plurality of mantissa bits, and a plurality of exponent bits, the process configured to operate on at least one pipeline stage register and comprising:
identifying for each of the N pairs of floating point values a maximum exponent sum (MAX_EXP) value among N sums of input exponent and coefficient exp

Assignees

• Redpine Signals Inc
• Ceremorphic Inc

Inventors

• Finch Dylan

Classifications

• G06F7/5443 Primary

  Sum of products (for applications thereof, see the relevant places, e.g. G06F17/10, H03H17/00) · CPC title

• G06F7/4876

  Multiplying · CPC title

• G06F7/49936

  Normalisation mentioned as feature only · CPC title

• G06F9/3893

  controlled in tandem, e.g. multiplier-accumulator · CPC title

• G06F7/499

  Denomination or exception handling, e.g. rounding or overflow · CPC title