Squaring units and a comparison with multipliers

Power is becoming a precious resource in modern VLSI design, even more so than area. With large number of applications requiring support of functional units like squares, cubes and other higher order units, it becomes imperative that such functions be implemented in hardware. Implementing those functions using existing general-purpose multipliers in a design may be economical in terms of area but requires more power consumption than is necessary. We propose to use dedicated squaring units to perform squares. We study the tradeoffs of using a dedicated squaring unit compared with a general-purpose multiplier designed with Radix-4 Modified Booth encoding scheme. We compare area and power requirements for different widths. We are able to reduce power consumed per computation by more than 50% with this approach. Moreover, when an application demands a large number of squaring operations compared to multiplies, there is a strong case for using multiple squaring units for performing multiplication.