Decimal floating-point multiplier with binary-decimal compression based fixed-point multiplier

This paper presents the design of pipelined IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating-point (DFP) multipliers targeting FPGAs. A key component of the architecture is the fixed-point multiplier function which impacts the overall performance and area utilization. In this paper, we propose a new method to realize this operation by carefully organizing the partial products and developing an algorithm for binary-decimal compression. The DFP multipliers with 5 to 12 pipeline stages are coded in VHDL and implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The overall design is compared with another approach based on fixed-point multipliers using a BCD-4221 compression technique. Using post layout extracted design data, our approach achieves a delay improvement in the range of 7.9% to 20.3% and an average LUT reduction of 5%.