Low power constant multiplier With variable precision computing capability

Abstract

It is well-known that shifting can replace a constant multiplication if the constant is a power of 2. We extend this idea in such a way that by employing more than 2 barrel shifters and a supplementary multiplier we can design a very efficient constant multiplier for general constants. With a support of variable precision computation, we can achieve high computational efficiency while maintaining decent computational accuracy. When compared with conventional multipliers, we could achieve up to 56% of power saving while having negligible computational errors.