Arithmetic Coding for Floating-Point Numbers

Abstract

To enable the usage of standard hardware in safety-critical applications for production systems, new approaches for hardware fault tolerance are required. These approaches must be implemented on software level. As shown in the literature, arithmetic coding is a promising approach, but only supports integer calculations. For complex safety functions, e.g. in robotics, fast floating-point calculations are needed. Therefore, this paper presents a method for direct arithmetic encoding of floating-point calculations with low-performance impact. Moreover, a detailed residual error estimation is given.