Patent ID: 6996596

Claim:
A floating-point unit (FPU) configurable to perform floating-point operations, comprising: an operand processing section operative to, for each floating-point operation, receive and process one or more input operands to provide a preliminary result comprised of a mantissa and an exponent; and an operand flush section coupled to the operand processing section and operative to check at least the exponent of the preliminary result to determine whether the preliminary result falls within one of a plurality of ranges of denormalized values between zero and a minimum normalized floating-point number, a min , wherein each range of denormalized values is associated with a respective set value defined by a particular exponent value and a particular mantissa value, and if the preliminary result falls within one of the plurality of ranges of denormalized values, set the preliminary result to the set value associated with the range of denormalized values within which the preliminary result falls.