title: How to calculate an arbitrary power/root?
body: <p>I have a application which needs to raise a number to a fractional power.  The target platform is an FPGA and I can get estimates on an FPU size for it, but I need an algorithm for raising a number to a fractional power just for a feasibility study.  I'm assuming floating point as a worst case, I expect in practice we will be able to use short cuts, but for now I want to show that worst case can be implemented on our part.</p>
  
  <p>Thought I'd ask here and see if there were any common methods that I could checkout. I know there are software methods of doing this, I want just a reasonably efficient algorithm to start with.  I'll worry about the FPGA implementation.</p>