Apparatus and method for approximating the magnitude of a complex number

Abstract From the Canadian patent

of the Invention, Vector magnitude approximating logic using logarithms of the vector's orthogonal components to select multiplier scaling constants and to minimize arithmetic-function and hardware complexity. The apparatus is particularly applicable to a high-throughput, pipelined, digital signal processing application such as radar. The vector magnitude is approximated by multiplying each component of a complex number representing the vector by selected scaling constants and then by summing the two resulting products. The scaling constants are selected by feeding each orthogonal component of the vector into one of two identical logic arrays which determine the base-2 logarithm of the …