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Low-Power Double-Precision Floating-Point Adder and Multiplier

Detailed Technology Description

The first detailed design and implementation of an asynchronous, low-power, double-precision floating-point adder (FPA) and floating point multiplier (FPM) compliant with current standards are presented for vastly improved computing efficiency.

Others

• Issued US patent 9,524,270
• Sheikh, B.R.; Manohar, R., "An Operand-Optimized Asynchronous IEEE 754 Double-Precision Floating-Point Adder," 2010 IEEE Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC).
• Basit Riaz Sheikh and Rajit Manohar, "An AsynchronousFloating-Point Multiplier," Proceedings of the 18th IEEE InternationalSymposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC), May 2012.

*Abstract

Based on the energy consumption analysis of functional building blocks of a baseline FPA, the energy-efficiency was improved by exploiting data-dependent optimization techniques for each functional block. Circuit simulation of the baseline asynchronous FPA shows a throughput of 2.15 GHz while consuming 69.3 pJ per operation in a 65nm bulk process.

 

A number of micro-architectural and circuit level optimizations are introduced to reduce power consumption in the FPM datapath. The FPM includes a higher radix array multiplier design withoperand-dependent carry propagation adder and low handshake overhead pipelinedesign. It also includes a hardware implementation of denormal andunderflow cases. When compared to a custom synchronous FPM design, thisasynchronous FPM consumes 3X less energy per operation while operating at 2.3Xhigher throughput.

 

Potential Applications:

• Floating-point arithmetic units for virtually any computer architecture
  • e.g. high performance processors, graphics processing units, etc.

 

Advantages:

• Fully compliant with IEEE standards
• Efficiency gains enable improved performance:
  • FPA reduced energy use to less than 50% while retaining throughput with no loss
  • FPM reduced energy use by 33% while increasing throughput over 2X

*Licensing

Martin Teschlmt439@cornell.edu(607) 254-4454

Country/Region

USA