A fully redundant decimal adder and its application in parallel decimal multipliers

Decimal hardware arithmetic units have recently regained popularity, as there is now a high demand for high performance decimal arithmetic. We propose a novel method for carry-free addition of decimal numbers, where each equally weighted decimal digit pair of the two operands is partitioned into two weighted bit-sets. The arithmetic values of these bit-sets are evaluated, in parallel, for fast computation of the transfer digit and interim sum. In the proposed fully redundant adder (VS semi-redundant ones such as decimal carry-save adders) both operands and sum are redundant decimal numbers with overloaded decimal digit set [0, 15]. This adder is shown to improve upon the latest high performance similar works and outperform all the previous alike adders. However, there is a drawback that the adder logic cannot be efficiently adapted for subtraction. Nevertheless, this adder and its restricted-input varieties are shown to efficiently fit in the design of a parallel decimal multiplier. The two-to-one partial product reduction ratio that is attained via the proposed adder has lead to a VLSI-friendly recursive partial product reduction tree. Two alternative architectures for decimal multipliers are presented; one is slower, but area-improved, and the other one consumes more area, but is delay-improved. However, both are faster in comparison with previously reported parallel decimal multipliers. The area and latency comparisons are based on logical effort analysis under the same assumptions for all the evaluated adders and multipliers. Moreover, performance correctness of all the adders is checked via running exhaustive tests on the corresponding VHDL codes. For more reliable evaluation, we report the result of synthesizing these adders by Synopsys Design Compiler using TSMC 0.13mm standard CMOS process under various time constrains. & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.