Design of low-error fixed-width multipliers for DSP applications

Abstract

In this work, two designs of low-error fixed-width sign-magnitude parallel multipliers and two's-complement parallel multipliers for digital signal processing applications are presented. Given two n-bit inputs, the fixed-width multipliers generate n-bit (instead of 2 n-bit) products with low product error, but use only about half the area and less delay when compared with a standard parallel multiplier. In them, cost-effective carry-generating circuits are designed, respectively, to make the products generated more accurately and quickly. Applying the same approach, a low error reduced-width multiplier with output bit-width between n- and 2n has also been designed. Experimental results show that the proposed fixed-width and reduced-width multipliers have lower error than all other fixed-width multipliers and are still cost effective. Due to these properties, they are very suitable for use in many multimedia and digital signal processing applications such as digital filtering, arithmetic coding, wavelet transformation, echo cancellation, etc.