Energy delay measures of barrel switch architectures for pre-alignment of floating point operands for addition

Significand pre-alignment is a pre requisite for floating point additions. This paper1 addresses the architectural design and energy delay evaluation of a Low Power Barrel Switch for pre-alignment of floating point significands. Architectural energy delay analysis of Barrel Switch schemes suggests the suitability of transition activity scaled architectures for Low Power CMOS designs. Our energy delay estimates of operand pre-alignment Barrel Switches for the addition of IEEE single precision floating point numbers, taking into account the architectural as well as circuit implementation issues, suggests an energy delay reduction of better than 50% for transition activity scaled architectures for coefficients of parasitic loading exceeding 10. The corresponding reduction in power consumption is more than 55%.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ISLPED
• Authors: R. V. K. Pillai, Dhamin Al-Khalili, Asim J. Al-Khalili
• Keywords: Activity Scaled Architectures, Energy Delay, Floating Point, Hardware, ISLPED 1997