What is the difference between DIRECT HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION and SOFTWARE SIMULATION of an arithmetic opern?

Question

Can you please explain how direct hardware implementation is done

Answer 1

I read above it would take weeks just to add two numbers, that's not true it takes just half a minute or so. When you implement hardware you typically don't work at the level of gates and wires, instead you use a high level language like vhdl. Anyway, a hardware implementation is best understood by looking at examples like CORDIC or the generalized version BKM. A hardware implementation benefits from that you can do more specialized stuff in hardware and it also benefits from collapsed control logic as it were. I duno if I'm good at explaining that. A software implementation would be something that uses hardware along with some kind of control signals, usually called instructions, while a hardware implementation has the control part hardwired as it were. Google CORDIC and BKM, it's interesting to read. You need to understand complex numbers to understand those algorithms, but they are not advanced and by no means do you need to be a mathematician to understand them.

Answer 2

It would probably take an electrical engineer a full week just to make a device that can add two predefined numbers with a basic electronic circuit (no processor or micro-controller), so I doubt anyone can explain such a complex operation in an answer here.



You would basically need a few registers (physically they could be flip flops), a few AND, XOR and possibly MOSFET gates, a timer to sequence the operations and a few transistors.



I found a page on Wikipedia that shows you some elements on how to do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder_%28electronics%29

Answer 3

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any easy way to explain how direct hardware implementation of arithmetic operations is done. Read through my first link to understand how direct hardware implementation of binary addition is done.