Division Unit for Binary Integer Decimals

Abstract

In this work, we present a radix-10 division unit that is based on the digit-recurrence algorithm and implements binary encodings (Binary Integer Decimal or BID) for significands. Recent decimal division designs are all based on the Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) encoding. We adapt the radix-10 digit-recurrence algorithm to BID representation and implement the division unit in standard cell technology. The implementation of the proposed BID division unit is compared to that of a BCD based unit implementing the same algorithm. The comparison shows that for normalized operands the BID unit has the same latency as the BCD unit and reduced area, but the normalization is more expensive when implemented in BID.