Project 9 – Updating the temperature sensor project to a pipelined floating-point implementation

In Project 9, we’ll be looking at how we can use floating points in our temperature sensor project. This will give us an idea of the cost of using floating points in a real-world application. First, let’s put our proposed design into a diagram to determine what we need:

Figure 7.13: Floating-point conversion pipeline

The pipeline looks very similar to our previous temperature pipeline. The main difference is that we are now converting to/from floating point on the input and output. Internally, the old 4-5 stage pipeline is handled similarly. However, each stage is no longer a single clock cycle since floating-point operations take longer to process.

To convert our temperature sensor and Fahrenheit conversion, we will need the following floating-point operations, all of which we can generate from the Vivado IP catalog, as we’ll see in the next...