Power comparisons for barrel shifters

Data shifting is required in many key computer operations from address decoding to computer arithmetic. Full barrel shifters are often on the critical path, which has led most research to be directed toward speed optimizations. With the advent of mobile computing, power has become as important as speed for circuit designs. In this paper we present a power-delay analysis for a range of 32-bit barrel shifters that vary at the gate, architecture, and environment levels.