A high speed and power efficient multiplier based on counter-based stacking

Abstract

High speed and competent addition of various operands is an essential operation in the design any computational unit. The swiftness and power competence of multiplier circuits plays vital role in enlightening the overall performance of microprocessors. Multipliers play crucial role in the design of arithmetic logic unit (ALU) or any digital signal processor (DSP) that are effectively employed for filtering and convolution operations. The process of multiplication either binary numbers or fixed-point numbers yields in enormous partial products that are to be added to get final product. These partial products in number and the process of summing up partial products dictate the latency and power consumption of the multiplier design. Here, we present a novel binary counter design that hires stacking circuits, that groups all logic “1” bits as one, followed by a novel symmetric method to merge pairs of 3-bit stacks into 6-bit stacks and then changes them to binary counts. This results in drastic improvements in power and area utilization of the multiplier. Additionally, this paper also focuses on implementation of novel approximate compressor and exploits the same for the design of approximate multipliers that can be effectively employed in any electronic systems that are characterized by power and speed constraints.