Efficiently determining a floor for a floating-point number

1. An apparatus for processing a binary floating-point number having a sign bit, an exponent portion, and a mantissa, the apparatus comprising:

means for indicating a fraction portion of the mantissa, based on the exponent portion of the binary floating-point number;

means for replacing the indicated fraction portion of the mantissa with the sign bit; and

means for producing a floor of the binary floating-point number.

2. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the means for indicating include:

means for concatenating an implicit bit of the binary floating-point number with the fraction portion of the mantissa and producing a first binary number such that the implicit bit is the most significant bit (MSB) of the first binary number;

means for decrementing the first binary number only if the sign bit indicates a negative binary floating-point number and leaving the first binary number changed otherwise, thereby producing a second binary number, and

means for identifying bits of the second binary number as the fraction portion of the mantissa, in accordance with the exponent portion.

3. The apparatus of claim 2 , further comprising a converter that is configured to convert the floor to a desired representation format.

4. The apparatus of claim 3 , wherein the desired representation format comprises two's complement format.

5. The apparatus of claim 3 , wherein the desired representation format comprises floating point format.

6. The apparatus of claim 2 , wherein the means for producing include:

a multiplexer configured to receive the identified fraction portion and operative to replace each constituent bit of the identified fraction portion with the sign bit, thereby producing a third binary number;

an exclusive-OR configured to perform an exclusive-OR operation between each bit of the third binary number and the sign bit thereby producing a fourth binary number;

means for concatenating the sign bit, the fourth binary number, and a first predetermined number of zeros, thereby producing a fifth binary number such that the sign bit is the MSB of the fifth binary number, and the zeros are the least significant bits of the fifth binary number; and

a signed-right-shift configured to perform, upon the fifth binary number, a signed-right-shift operation by a number of bits equivalent to the difference between the exponent and a second predetermined number, thereby producing the floor of the binary floating-point number in integer format.

7. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the means for indicating include a fraction mask table configured to identify the fraction portion of the binary floating-point number, based at least on the exponent portion of the binary floating-point number.

8. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the means for producing include a multiplexer configured to receive the identified fraction portion and operative to replace each constituent bit of the identified fraction portion with the sign bit, thereby producing the floor.