The first part of Design a Floating Point Unit concentrates on an introduction to floating point numbers and the IEEE 754 standard for single precision 32 bit floating point binary numbers.

This course concentrates on the basics of floating point numbers. How to convert from decimal to 32 bit floating point binary and back again. We look at both normal and subnormal (denormal) numbers , nearest even rounding and rounding errors, precision and cover all the details we need from the IEEE754 standard for 32 bit single precision floating point binary numbers.

Throughout the course we use a conversion tool that I created in Microsoft Excel VBA which helps us to automate the conversion process and also helps us to understand and check the results of conversion. Without this type of tool teaching and learning about floating point numbers would be a difficult and laborious process. I hope that this tool helps to demystify floating point numbers and make them more understandable.

By ensuring we have a solid foundation in floating point numbers we can then go ahead in the later courses to design each of the floating point arithmetic operations required to produce a full floating point unit in Logisim.

Once this course is completed then you will have all the information required to progress to the next course , Design a Floating Point Unit 2 - Multiplier.