What is a floating point number?
A floating point number is the representation of a real number that consists of three parts: • a significand, or mantissa, that defines the magnitude of a number • an exponent, that scales a number • a sign, that indicates if a number is positive or negative Microcontrollers most commonly use floating point numbers stored as 32-bit values. The uM-FPU V3 chip conforms to the standard for 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point numbers, but it can also read and write an alternate 32-bit format used by some Microchip PIC assemblers and compilers.
