Decimal multiplier on FPGA using embedded binary multipliers

Decimal arithmetic has become a major necessity in computer arithmetic operations associated with human-centric applications, like financial and commercial, because the results must match exactly those obtained by human calculations. The relevance of decimal arithmetic has become evident with the revision of the IEEE-754 standard to include decimal floating-point support. There are already a variety of IP cores available for implementing binary arithmetic accelerators in FPGAs. Thus far, however, little work has been done with regard to implementing cores that work with decimal arithmetic. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to the design of a decimal multiplier in FPGA using the embedded arithmetic blocks and a novel method for binary to BCD conversion. The proposed circuits were implemented in a Xilinx Virtex 4sx35ff877-12 FPGA. The results indicate that the proposed binary to BCD converter is more efficient than the traditional shift and add-3 algorithm and that the proposed decimal multiplier is very competitive when compared to decimal multipliers implemented with direct manipulation of BCD numbers.