Survey of arithmetic integrated circuits

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to provide the state-of-the-art of high performance arithmetic integrated circuits (ICs). The survey concentrates on arithmetic ICs that are designed to improve execution speed over software techniques, therefore, no calculator chips are surveyed. In order to understand the difficulties encountered in fabricating high speed arithmetic ICs, we start the article with a discussion on semiconductor technology. Next, we survey the various arithmetic elements that are available in monolithic form: ALUs, Data Slices, Multipliers, Floating Point Processors, and ROMs. Finally, we conclude with a comment on digital signal processing and a discussion of the future trends in arithmetic ICs.