[Editor's note: For an intro to fixed-point math, see Fixed-Point DSP and Algorithm Implementation. For a comparison of fixed- and floating-point hardware, see Fixed vs. floating point: a surprisingly ...

An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy.

Routines for the PIC16/17 families are provided in a modified IEEE 754 32-bit format together with versions in 24-bit reduced format. Although fixed point arithmetic can usually be employed in many ...