Design and experimentation with low-power morphable multipliers

Reconfigurable computing is a cost-effective alternative to technology shrinking in order to achieve higher performance in digital design, especially considering run time reconfiguration. Research in the field consists of new reconfig-urable architectures, either coarse-grain or fine-grain, and new methodologies to map applications onto them. A special case of coarse-grain reconfigurable components are morphable multipliers, which use multiplexers to feed different inputs and form different connection schemes within the datapath of conventional multipliers. These connection schemes form different components that can be utilized when the initial multiplier is idle. Morphable components offer performance improvements but the use of extra multiplexers impose power overheads. This paper applies two low-power design techniques, power gating and multi V_th components, for the design of low-power morphable multipliers. Experimentation with these multipliers show that they can offer performance, area and power improvements compared to other alternative architectures, making them valuable building blocks for hardware synthesis.