A Variable Latency K'th Order Newton-Raphson's Floating Point Number Divider

The commonly used Newton-Raphson's floating-point number divider algorithm performs two multiplications in one iteration. In this paper, a tentative K'th Newton-Raphson's floating-point number divider algorithm which performs K times multiplications in one iteration is proposed. Since the number of multiplications performed by the proposed algorithm is dependent on the input values, the average number of multiplications per an operation in single precision and double precision divider is derived from many reciprocal tables with varying sizes. In addition, an error correction algorithm, which consists of one multiplication and a decision, to get exact result in divider is proposed. Since the proposed algorithm only performs the multiplications until the error gets smaller than a given value, it can be used to improve the performance of a floating point number divider unit. Also, it can be used to construct optimized approximate reciprocal tables.