Hamming Distance and Normalization Circuits

The Hamming distance and normalization are important in many digital signal processing algorithms apart from multiply and multiply-accumulate operations. These operations are time consuming unless complex hardware is included, increasing power consumption and latency. This paper proposes a design based on a compressor circuit implemented by pass-transistor logic to perform both the Hamming distance and normalization functions on the same circuit for a general DSP. This enables a significant reduction in the number of transistors without sacrificing the performance or incurring the power penalty compared to the earlier designs which implemented the functions separately.