Patent US 5,249,149

A method for performing floating point division is provided for producing a quotient having a mantissa of n bits. The method consists of the steps of accessing an initial guess of a reciprocal of the divisor from a table of divisor reciprocals, computing an initial estimate the quotient in a corresponding estimate from the initial estimate of the reciprocal, increasing the precision of the mantissa of the reciprocal estimate, quotient estimate, and remainder estimate by computing an error parameter and iteratively computing a current reciprocal estimate, a current quotient estimate and a current remainder estimate from the error parameter and the latest reciprocal estimate, quotient estimate and remainder estimates. Also, the step of increasing the precision is repeated until the quotient estimate and reciprocal estimate exceed n bits. Lastly, the final quotient is computed from the last current quotient estimate plus the last current reciprocal estimate times the last current remainder estimate. A floating point apparatus is also provided that implements the floating point division method. The application of this method and apparatus provide a quotient result that is correctly rounded without conditionally testing the magnitude of the quotient.