Novel architecture for floating point accumulator with cancelation error detection

A floating point accumulator cannot be obtained straightforwardly due to its pipeline architecture and feedback loop. Therefore, an essential part of the proposed floating point accumulator is a critical accumulation loop which is limited to an integer adder and 16-bit shifter only. The proposed accumulator detects a catastrophic cancellation which occurs e.g. when two similar numbers are subtracted. Additionally, modules with reduced hardware resources for rough error evaluation are proposed. The proposed architecture does not comply with the IEEE-754 floating point standard but it guarantees that a correct result, with an arbitrarily defined number of significant bits, is obtained. The proposed calculation philosophy focuses on the desired result error rather than on calculation precision as such.