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Abstract

Special-purpose digital-compute hardware for fully-programmable look-up-tables is provided. In one aspect, a system for implementing a continuous function by piecewise linear approximation includes: at least one memory programmatically loaded with an indexed table of slope/intercept values of linear segments along a gradient of the continuous function approximating a plurality of contiguous ranges of the continuous function; at least one Bin ID logic having data registers programmatically loaded with bin-threshold values corresponding to the plurality of contiguous ranges defining a series of arbitrarily-spaced bins; and a Fused-Multiply-Add circuit configured to multiply an incoming data element by a slope value and add an intercept value from the indexed table of slope/intercept values selected based on the bin-threshold values. Comparators in the Bin ID logic can be configured to compare the incoming data-element with the bin-threshold values. A method for implementing a continuous function by piecewise linear approximation is also provided.

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