Towards Fixed-Point Formats Determination for Faust Programs

Modern programmable digital signal processing relies on floating-point numbers for their ease of use. Fixed-point number formats have the potential to save resources and improve execution time, but realising this potential burdens the programmer with the need to define each format, at every step of the computation. This article reviews existing methods to automatically determine fixed-point formats, then describes and evaluates the prototype implementation of automatic fixed-point format determination in the Faust compiler.