THE IMPACT OF DATA CHARACTERISTICS AND HARDWARE TOPOLOGY ON HARDWARE SELECTION FOR

Adders and multipliers are key operations in DSP systems. The power consumption of adders is well understood but there are few detailed results on the choice of multipliers available. This paper considers how the power consumption of a number of multiplier structures such as Carry-Save array and Wallace Tree multipliers varies with data wordlengths and different layout strategies. In all cases, results were obtained from EPIC PowerMill simulations of actual synthesised circuit layouts. Analysis of the results highlights the effects of routing and interconnect optimization for low power operation and gives clear indications on choice of multiplier structure and design flow for the rapid design of DSP systems. 1.1 Keywords Low power DSP systems, optimum hardware selection, multiplier structures. 2