[Editor's note: For an intro to floating-point math, see Tutorial: Floating-point arithmetic on FPGAs. For a comparison of fixed- and floating-point hardware, see Fixed vs. floating point: a ...

You may have seen dB specs thrown around for various products available on the market today. Table 1 lists a few fairly established products along with their assigned signal quality, measured in dB.

Many numerical applications typically use floating-point types to compute values. However, in some platforms, a floating-point unit may not be available. Other platforms may have a floating-point unit ...