Nios II Classic Processor Reference Guide

ID 683620
Date 10/28/2016
Public
Document Table of Contents

4.6.1.1. Floating Point Hardware 2 Custom Instruction

The Nios II processor offers a set of optional predefined custom instructions that implement floating-point arithmetic operations. You can include these custom instructions to support computation-intensive floating-point applications.

The Floating Point Hardware 2 Custom Instruction is a high performance component with predefined custom instructions that implement single-precision floating-point operations. This component offers improved performance with lower cycle counts for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and also supports floating-point operations such as square root, comparison, minimum/maximum, negate/absolute, and conversion.

The Floating Point Hardware 2 component is composed of two custom instructions:

  • Combinational custom instruction—Implements the minimum, maximum, compare, negate, and absolute operations.
  • Multi-cycle custom instruction—Implements the add, substract, multiply, divide, square root, and convert operations.

The component has two slaves, one slave for the combinatorial custom instruction and the other slave for the multi-cycle custom instruction.

The opcode extensions for the Floating Point Hardware 2 custom instructions are 224 through 255. Refer to the Floating Point Custom Instruction 2 Operation Summary table in the "Floating Point Custom Instruction 2 Component" section in the Processor Architecture chapter for details.

To add the Floating Point Hardware 2 custom instruction to the Nios II processor in Qsys, select Floating Point Hardware 2 under Embedded Processors in the Component Library tab. Connect the two slave interfaces to the Nios II custom instruction master.