Return of the hardware floating-point elementary function

The study of specific hardware circuits for the evalu-ation of floating-point elementary functions was once an active research area, until it was realized that these func-tions were not frequent enough to justify dedicating silicon to them. Research then turned to software functions. This situation may be about to change again with the advent of reconfigurable co-processors based on field-programmable gate arrays. Such co-processors now have a capacity that allows them to accomodate double-precision floating-point computing. Hardware operators for elementary functions targeted to such platforms have the potential to vastly out-perform software functions, and will not permanently waste silicon resources. This article studies the optimization, for this target technology, of operators for the exponential and logarithm functions up to double-precision. These opera-tors are freely available from www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/ Arenaire/