An Asynchronous Floating-Point Multiplier

We present the details of our energy-efficient asynchronous floating-point multiplier (FPM). We discuss design trade-offs of various multiplier implementations. A higher radix array multiplier design with operand-dependent carry-propagation adder and low handshake overhead pipeline design is presented, which yields significant energy savings while preserving the average throughput. Our FPM also includes a hardware implementation of denormal and underflow cases. When compared against a custom synchronous FPM design, our asynchronous FPM consumes 3X less energy per operation while operating at 2.3X higher throughput. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed design of a high-performance asynchronous IEEE-754 compliant double-precision floating-point multiplier.