Announcements

• Lab 2 out and due Tuesday

  • If you've been having a lot of issues w/ Quartus and need an extension, please check in with me. Also try remote desktop (instructions in L8)

• Lab 1s will be graded later this week and early next

• Schedule for the rest of this half of the semester before break is posted below. Review materials here. The review session will cover example problems. Exam will be open book and on Moodle.

  

• Office hours: by appointment (email me if none of those times work)

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

In this lecture, you will...

• listen to a short lecture on floating point
• work on some problems related to floating point in small groups
• listen to a short lecture on sequential circuits and timing

By the end of this lecture, you should be able to...

• define the term "denormalized number"
• take an arbitrary decimal number and convert it to floating point representation, and vice versa
• calculate the propagation delay of a combinational circuit
• calculate whether a circuit meets the setup and hold time constraints
• complete all of the assigned content for lab 2
• complete the extra credit on lab 2, if desired

In Class Work

<aside> 💡 How are numbers represented in commonly used programming languages? In C, you can decide whether to use integers or floating point values by declaring a variable as int or float. MATLAB defaults to double precision floating point numbers. Python also uses floating point. Both MATLAB and Python round the value displayed to the end user.

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Fixed point numbers are an alternative to floating point numbers. Here's a fun article about why the programming language COBOL is still widely used today, and the limitations of some modern programming languages such as Python and Java. This came to a head during the pandemic because many government systems run COBOL and needed to update e.g. code for processing unemployment applications.

</aside>