Multiplier Circuit with Dynamic Energy Consumption Adjustment
AssigneeWisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
InventorNam Sung Kim
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A fixed point multiplier that can be used in mobile computer systems operating under limited power constraints provides a trade-off between computational accuracy and energy consumption that may be changed dynamically for energy conservation purposes. In one embodiment, the multiplier pre-stores multiplication shift coefficients to eliminate leading-one circuitry normally used in shift and accumulate multipliers.
Claims16
An electronic computer system comprising:
- a processor providing for execution of arithmetic and logic instructions and including a fixed point multiplier circuit for multiplication of data values, wherein the multiplier circuit provides a variable accuracy;
- and
- an accuracy controller communicating with the multiplier circuit to change the accuracy of the multiplier circuit during execution of instructions by the processor.
An electronic computer system comprising:
- a processor core providing for execution of arithmetic and logic instructions and including a multiplier circuit for multiplication of data values wherein the multiplier employs a multiply and accumulate process;
- and
- further including a coefficient memory holding stored values indicating successive locations of ones in given multiplier data and wherein the multiplication is provided by shifting of a multiplicand datum based on the stored values in the coefficient memory for the given multiplier data.
A method of operation of a computer processor executing a program stored in non-transitory medium and multiplying a series of run-time varying multiplicands with a set of predetermined multipliers comprising the steps of:
- (a) extracting a series of coefficients from the multipliers indicating positions of ones in binary representation of the multipliers;
- (b) storing the coefficients for each multiplier indexed to the multiplier;
- and
- (c) multiplying a multiplicand with a given multiplier by successively shifting the multiplicand by the coefficient values for the given multiplier and accumulating a sum of the shifted multiplicands to produce a product.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.