Signed saturation

1. What is signed saturation?
2. What is saturation in Verilog?
3. What does it mean when a function saturates?
4. What is saturating arithmetic and what are its advantages and disadvantages in typical multimedia applications?

What is signed saturation?

Saturation means that, for some value of 2 ⁿ that depends on the instruction: For a signed saturating operation, if the full result would be less than -2 ⁿ , the result returned is -2 ⁿ . For an unsigned saturating operation, if the full result would be negative, the result returned is zero.

What is saturation in Verilog?

• Saturation is a fundamental method to reduce the size of a word, such as after arithmetic operations. – For example to maintain the word width for memory storage. • When saturated, bits are removed from the MSB end of the input word.

What does it mean when a function saturates?

An activation function is said to saturate (without qualification) if it both left and right saturates. Most common activation functions used in recurrent networks (for example, tanh and sigmoid) are saturating. In particular they are soft saturating, meaning that they achieve saturation only in the limit.

What is saturating arithmetic and what are its advantages and disadvantages in typical multimedia applications?

What is saturating arithmetic and how does it help? Saturating arithmetic eliminates the need for overflows and underflows on MMX instructions. If a result is out of bounds, it is saturated to the closest allowable value. Many multimedia applications benefit from saturating arithmetic by avoiding wraparound artifacts.