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 may 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.