As defined by the IEEE 754 standard, floating-point values are represented in three fields: a significand or mantissa, a sign bit for the significand and an exponent field. The exponent is a biased ...

The term floating point is derived from the fact that there is no fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point; namely, the decimal point can float. There are also representations in ...

Engineers targeting DSP to FPGAs have traditionally used fixed-point arithmetic, mainly because of the high cost associated with implementing floating-point arithmetic. That cost comes in the form of ...

Embedded C and C++ programmers are familiar with signed and unsigned integers and floating-point values of various sizes, but a number of numerical formats can be used in embedded applications. Here ...

The traditional view is that the floating-point number format is superior to the fixed-point number format when it comes to representing sound digitally. In fact, while it may be counter-intuitive, ...

A way to represent very large and very small numbers using the same quantity of numeric positions. Floating point also enables calculating a wide range of numbers very quickly. Although floating point ...

On February 25, 1991, during the eve of the of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a Scud missile fired from Iraqi positions hit a US Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A defense was available – ...