An Energy-Efficient Multiplier with Fully Overlapped Partial Products Reduction and Final Addition

An energy-efficient fast array multiplier is proposed and designed. The multiplier operates in a left-to-right mode enabling a full overlap between reduction of partial products in carry-save form and the final addition producing the product. The design is based on the left-to-right carry-free (LRCF) multiplier. It differs from the LRCF multiplier in a much smaller on-the-fly conversion circuit of O(n) size and the use of radix-4 full adders in the conversion. The new converter produces the most-significant half of the product during the reduction process. It eliminates the most-significant part of the final adder. The least-significant half of the product is obtained with a carry-ripple adder during the reduction. Thus conversion of the carry-save form of accumulated partial products to the conventional product does not add any delay to the total time of the multiplier. Several right-to-left, left-to-right multipliers and tree multipliers are designed for 16, 24, 32, and 56 bits, and radices 2 and 4, synthesized in 90 nm technology and compared, demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed design with respect to area, delay, power, and energy. We considered both truncated and full-precision multipliers. The proposed multiplier has lower delay, area, power, and energy than other considered types of array multipliers. Its advantages grow with the increase in precision. As expected, it is slower than a tree multiplier but it has smaller area, power, and energy.