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Energy-Efficient Multiple-Precision Floating-Point Multiplier for Embedded Applications

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Abstract

Floating-point (FP) multipliers are the main energy consumers in many modern embedded digital signal processing (DSP) and multimedia systems. For lossy applications, minimizing the precision of FP multiplication operations under the acceptable accuracy loss is a well-known approach for reducing the energy consumption of FP multipliers. This paper proposes a multiple-precision FP multiplier to efficiently trade the energy consumption with the output quality. The proposed FP multiplier can perform low-precision multiplication that generates 8−, 14−, 20−, or 26-bit mantissa product through an iterative and truncated modified Booth multiplier. Energy saving for low-precision multiplication is achieved by partially suppressing the computation of mantissa multiplier. In addition, the proposed multiplier allows the bitwidth of mantissa in the multiplicand, multiplier, and output product to be dynamically changed when it performs different FP multiplication operations to further reduce energy consumption. Experimental results show that the proposed multiplier can achieve 59 %, 71 %, 73 %, and 82 % energy saving under 0.1 %, 1 %, 5 %, and 11 % accuracy loss, respectively, for the RGB-to-YUV & YUV-to-RGB conversion when compared to the conventional IEEE single-precision multiplier. In addition, the results also exhibit that the proposed multiplier can obtain more energy reduction than previous multiple-precision iterative FP multipliers.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSC 98-2220-E-110-006. The authors would like to thank the National Chip Implementation Center, Taiwan, for their contributions and support in technology data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University, No. 70 Lien-Hai Rd., Kaohsiung, 80424, Taiwan

    Shiann-Rong Kuang, Kun-Yi Wu & Kee-Khuan Yu

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  1. Shiann-Rong Kuang
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  2. Kun-Yi Wu
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  3. Kee-Khuan Yu
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Correspondence to Shiann-Rong Kuang.

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Kuang, SR., Wu, KY. & Yu, KK. Energy-Efficient Multiple-Precision Floating-Point Multiplier for Embedded Applications. J Sign Process Syst 72, 43–55 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-012-0695-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-012-0695-1

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