Method and apparatus for calculating floating point exponent values

摘要

A data processing system (10) has a circuit for determining floating point exponents for divide operations and square root operations. The circuit has two input multiplexers (26 and 28) which provide exponent information or constants to an adder (30). The exponent information and constants are processed by the adder (30) to output three possible exponent values for either a divide operation or a square root operation. The three possible exponent values are stored in three registers (34, 36, and 38). A multiplexer (40) used mantissa rounding and normalizing information to determine which exponent of the three possible exponent values are correct for the current floating point calculation.