[April 03, 2013] Altera Assigned Patent Tweet (Targeted News Service Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) By Targeted News Service ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 3 -- Altera, San Jose, Calif., has been assigned a patent (8,412,756) developed by Martin Langhammer, Alderbury, United Kingdom, for a "multi-operand floating point operations in a programmable integrated circuit device." The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A programmable logic device is programmed to add a plurality N of unnormalized numbers at once. Because the inputs are not normalized, they could all have different exponents. The largest exponent of the N exponents is found, and for each of the inputs, its mantissa is right-shifted at by the difference between the largest exponent and the exponent of that particular input. The N shifted mantissas are combined, optionally with sign data, in an (N+1):2 compressor to provide carry and save vectors which may be combined in a carry-propagate adder. Numbers may converted back to normalized form at the end of the operation. If necessary to avoid data loss, a number may be normalized after an intermediate step." The patent application was filed on Sept. 11, 2009 (12/557,952). The full-text of the patent can be found at http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=8,412,756&OS=8,412,756&RS=8,412,756 Written by Arpi Sharma; edited by Anand Kumar. AS0403AK0403-861410 (c) 2013 Targeted News Service [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]