An exact floating point square root calculator using multiplier
Gyeong-Yeon Cho · The Journal of the Korean Institute of Information and Communication Engineering · 2009
There are two major algorithms to find a square root of floating point number, one is the Newton_Raphson algorithm and GoldSchmidt algorithm which calculate it approximately by iterating multiplications and the other is SRT algorithm which calculates it exactly by iterating subtractions. This paper proposes an exact floating point square root algorithm using only multiplication. At first an approximate inverse square root is calculated by Newton_Raphson algorithm, and then an exact square root algorithm by reducing an error in it and a compensation algorithm of it are proposed. The proposed algorithm is verified to calculate all of numbers in a single precision floating point number and 1 billion random numbers in a double precision floating point number. The proposed algorithm requires only the multipliers without another hardware, so it can be widely used in an embedded system and mobile production which requires an efact square root of floating point number.