Article: floating point in embedded systems
In a similar way to blog posts here, I often endeavor to address a specific technical matter, that is pertinent to embedded software, in articles I publish elsewhere. Sometimes the topic is a matter where a developer does not need a detailed knowledge on a day-to-day basis, but an understanding of what is going on “under the hood” may be useful. My latest article on embedded.com is a good example …
Floating point data in embedded software
Although many embedded applications can be implemented using integer arithmetic, there are times when the ability to deal with floating point (real) numbers is required. This article looks at the details of floating point operations, when floating point should and should not be used, some of the pitfalls of its use and how its use may sometimes be avoided.
Of course, a good set of embedded development tools will take care of matters for you, but using such tools “blind” may not always be wise.
