Next the mantissas are added and the new exponent is merely copied. The final result might be larger than 1, so it would have to be normalized by shifting the mantissa to the right and adding 1 to the exponent. This could lead to overflow, which we do not show.

Also, the sign circuitry is not shown. It is non-trivial because if the signs are different, subtraction must be performed instead of addition. The resulting sign depends upon the result of the subtraction if the two operand signs were different. Otherwise, the sign of the result is identical to the operand signs if they were originally the same. In fact, implementing subtraction is trivial since the addition hardware implements it anyway. To subtract A-B, just change the sign of B and perform addition.