With the growing popularity of decimal computer arithmetic in scientific, commercial, financial and Internet-based applications, hardware realisation of decimal arithmetic algorithms is gaining more importance. Hardware decimal arithmetic units now serve as an integral part of some recently commercialised general purpose processors, where complex decimal arithmetic operations, such as multiplication, have been realised by rather slow iterative hardware algorithms. However, with the rapid advances in very large scale integration (VLSI) technology, semi-and fully parallel hardware decimal multiplication units are expected to evolve soon. The dominant representation for decimal digits is the binary-coded decimal (BCD) encoding. The BCD-digit multiplier can serve as the key building block of a decimal multiplier, irrespective of the degree of parallelism. A BCD-digit multiplier produces a two-BCD digit product from two input BCD digits. We provide a novel design for the latter, showing some advantages in BCD multiplier implementations.

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The authors study previous major contributions to digit recurrence decimal division hardware and focus on techniques for improving the performance of quotient digit selection (QDS) as the most complex part. In particular, Design D1 uses the digit set [25, 5] for quotient digits. Another design (D2) uses mixed binary/decimal carry-save manipulation of the few most significant digits of partial remainders. Motivated by successful combined arithmetic algorithms such as hybrid adders, the authors offer a decimal division scheme that takes advantage of the best design options of D1 and D2 with due modifications that significantly enhance the division speed. In particular, they configure the architectures of QDS and partial remainder computation paths in favour of reduced balanced latencies of both. Furthermore, they remove the rounding cycle by cost-free auto-rounding, which is an exclusive advantage of the digit set [25, 5]. The authors of D1 and D2 have used logical effort (LE) and circuit synthesis to evaluate their dividers, respectively. Therefore for a fair comparison, the authors evaluate the proposed design (D3) with both methods. The LE-based D3/D1 comparison shows 21% more speed at the cost of 6% more area, whereas the synthesis-based D3/D2 comparison results in 46% less latency and 23% less area.

Data shifting is required in many key computer operations from address decoding to computer arithmetic. Full barrel shifters are often on the critical path, which has led most research to be directed toward speed optimizations. With the advent of quantum computer and reversible logic, design and implementation of all devices in this logic has received more attention. This paper proposes a reversible implementation of a barrel shifter, and also evaluation of its quantum cost is presented.