32-bit floating point
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Norsk Data 32-bit single precision format:
| bit 31 | (1 bit) | Sign bit |
| bit 30-22 | (9 bits) | Exponent |
| bit 21-0 | (22 bits) | Mantissa |
Exponent has a bias of +256. (Subtract 256 to get true exponent)
Special values for exponent:
| All bits zero except sign bit: | Floating underflow. |
| 0 (binary 0, aka 0x00): | Zero. Strictly speaking this is for the ND-500(0). The ND-100 spec says floating zero: All 32 bits zero. But any ND-100 introduced after the ND-500 would presumably be compatible, if not before. |
Mantissa has an implicit 23th bit of 1 (unless mantissa is 0). This is the 0.5 bit, i.e. mantissa is normalised to be 0.5 < mantissa < 1.0
Decimal point is thus to the left of the implicit 23th bit.