Low-power radix-8 divider

This work describes the design of a double-precision radix-8 divider. Low-power techniques are applied in the design of the unit, and energy-delay tradeoffs considered. The energy dissipation in the divider can be reduced by up to 70% with respect to a standard implementation not optimized for energy, without penalizing the latency. The radix-8 divider is compared with one obtained by overlapping three radix-2 stages and with a radix-4 divider. Results show that the latency of our divider is similar to that of the divider with overlapped stages, but the area is smaller. The speed-up of the radix-8 over the radix-4 is about 20% and the energy dissipated to complete a division is almost the same, although the area of the radix-8 is 50% larger.