The Block Exponent (BLK_EXP) field in the
Data Output and the Status channels (used only with the block floating-point option) contains
the block exponent. For a multichannel core, there is a separate BLK_EXP
field for each channel. The value present in the field represents the total number of bits the
data was scaled during the transform. For example, if BLK_EXP has a value of
00101 = 5, this means the associated output data (XK_RE,
XK_IM) was scaled by 5 bits (shifted right by 5 bits), or in other words,
was divided by 32, to fully use the available dynamic range of the output datapath without
overflowing. Because block scaling is performed based on the maximum value at each stage of
processing, the BLK_EXP value might differ from one architecture to another,
even with identical input data, due to the different inherent scaling performed per stage of
processing in each architecture.