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- Affiliation
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AffiliationUniversity of Saskatchewan
- Country
Posit number system has been used as an alternative to IEEE floating-point number system in many applications. Among all the related arithmetic operations, multiplication is one of the most frequent operations used in applications. However, due to the bit-width flexibility nature of posit numbers, the hardware multiplier is usually designed with the maximum possible mantissa bit-width. As the mantissa bit-width is not always the maximum value, such multiplier design leads to a high power consumption especially when the mantissa bit-width is small. In this paper, a power efficient posit multiplier architecture is proposed. The mantissa multiplier is still designed for the maximum possible bit-width, however, the whole multiplier is divided into multiple smaller multipliers. Only the required small multipliers are enabled at run-time. Those smaller multipliers are controlled by the regime bit-width which can be used to determine the mantissa bit-width. This design technique is applied to 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit posit formats in this paper and an average of 16% power reduction can be achieved with negligible area and timing overhead.