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 ...

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 – ...

Floating-point values contain three fields: a sign bit, exponent bits, and significand or mantissa bits. The IEEE-754 floating-point number format defined a common floating-point format that most ...

[Editor's note: For an intro to fixed-point math, see Fixed-Point DSP and Algorithm Implementation. For a comparison of fixed- and floating-point hardware, see Fixed vs. floating point: a surprisingly ...

Under CMS, floating-point representation (unlike scientific notation) uses a base of 16 rather than base 10. IBM mainframe systems all use the same floating-point representation, which is made up of 4 ...

Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language has variable types for three different kinds of numbers: integer, floating-point and decimal. Integer variables range from a short 2-byte format to a long ...

Although many embedded applications can be implemented using integer arithmetic, there are times when the ability to deal with floating point (real) numbers is required. This article looks at the ...

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 ...

Although something that’s taken for granted these days, the ability to perform floating-point operations in hardware was, for the longest time, something reserved for people with big wallets. This ...