EXPANDING THE RANGE OF CONVERGENCE OF THE CORDIC ALGORITHM

Since the late 1950's when the CORDIC algorithm for the numerical calculation of products, quotients, and many transcendental functions was proposed by Volder [1], this technique has increased in popularity especially in the area of special-purpose arithmetic processors and desk calculator applications. In this paper, the authors discuss the limitations on the numerical values of the functional arguments that are passed to these CORDIC computational units with a special emphasis on the binary, fixed-point hardware implementation. Research in the area of expanding the allowed ranges of the input variables for which accurate output values can be obtained is presented. Examples mentioned in this paper demonstrate the usefulness of the methods described here in realistic situations.