Dual-Purpose Hardware Algorithms and Architectures – Part 2: Integer Division

Integer division is different from floating-point division in that (1) the execution time of an integer division is highly dependent on the leading 1 locations of operands, (2) x and −x have different magnitude parts if x is a two’s complement integer, and (3) rounding is not necessary. In this paper, we apply the interval-analysis-based division algorithm proposed in "Dual-Purpose Hardware Algorithms and Architecture – Part 1: Floating-Point Division" [1] to offline and online integer division. We implement four online integer dividers using the algorithm, compare them with other dividers, and present detailed simulation results with in-depth analysis of the dividers. We find that the online dividers outperform the offline dividers when the waiting time for online operands goes up and the number of quotient bits to obtain goes down.