An Asynchronous floating-point multiplier

Basit Riaz Sheikh and Rajit Manohar

We present the details of our energy-efficient asynchronous floating-point multiplier (FPM) design. We discuss design trade-offs of various multiplier implementations. A higher radix array multiplier design with operand-dependent carry-propagation adder is presented which yields significant energy savings while preserving the average throughput. We provide a number of operand-dependent optimizations across the entire FPM datapath to reduce energy consumption. Our FPM implementation also includes a hardware implementation of special cases in the IEEE-754 standard such as denormal and underflow cases. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed design of a high-performance asynchronous double-precision floating-point multiplier.
 
  
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