Digital signal processors (DSPs) represent one of the fastest growing segments of the embedded world. Yet despite their ubiquity, DSPs present difficult challenges for programmers. In particular, ...

An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy.

Hardware for integer or fixed-point arithmetic is relatively simple to design, at least at the register-transfer level. If the range of values and precision that can be represented with these formats ...