# Comparing Different Decodings for Posit Arithmetic

Posit arithmetic has caught the attention of the research community as one of the most promising alternatives to the IEEE 754 standard for floating-point arithmetic. However, the recentness of the posit format makes its hardware less mature and thus more expensive than the floating-point hardware. Most approaches proposed so far decode posit numbers in a similar manner as classical floats. Recently, a novel decoding approach has been proposed, which in contrast with the previous one, considers negative posits to have a negative fraction. In this paper, we present a generic implementation for the latter and offer comparisons of posit addition and multiplication units based on both schemes. ASIC synthesis reveals that this alternative approach enables a faster way to perform operations while reducing the area, power and energy of the functional units. What is more, the proposed posit operators are shown to improve the state-of-the-art of implementations in terms of area, power and energy consumption.

R. Murillo, D. Mallasén, A. A. Del Barrio, and G. Botella, “Comparing Different Decodings for Posit Arithmetic,” in Next Generation Arithmetic, vol. 13253, J. Gustafson and V. Dimitrov, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022, pp. 84–99. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-09779-9_6.
@incollection{murillo2022Comparing,
title = {Comparing {{Different Decodings}} for {{Posit Arithmetic}}},
booktitle = {Next {{Generation Arithmetic}}},
author = {Murillo, Raul and Mallas{\'e}n, David and Del Barrio, Alberto A. and Botella, Guillermo},
editor = {Gustafson, John and Dimitrov, Vassil},
year = {2022},
volume = {13253},
pages = {84--99},
publisher = {{Springer International Publishing}},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-09779-9_6},
isbn = {978-3-031-09778-2 978-3-031-09779-9},
langid = {english}
}