Hardware support for UNUM floating point arithmetic

International audienceThe Universal NUMber, or UNUM, is a variable length floating-point format conceived to substitute the current one defined in the IEEE 754 standard. UNUM is able, through an internal algebra based on interval arithmetic, to keep track of the precision during operations, offering better result reliability than IEEE 754. This work discusses the implementation of UNUM arithmetic and reports hardware implementation results of some of the UNUM operators