[Editor's note: For an intro to fixed-point math, see Fixed-Point DSP and Algorithm Implementation. For a comparison of fixed- and floating-point hardware, see Fixed vs. floating point: a surprisingly ...

Floating-point values contain three fields: a sign bit, exponent bits, and significand or mantissa bits. The IEEE-754 floating-point number format defined a common floating-point format that most ...

Floating-point arithmetic is a cornerstone of numerical computation, enabling the approximate representation of real numbers in a format that balances range and precision. Its widespread applicability ...

The term floating point is derived from the fact that there is no fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point; namely, the decimal point can float. There are also representations in ...