Variable-correction truncated floating point multipliers

About half the hardware for floating point multipliers is needed only to guarantee correctly rounded results. For multimedia, graphics, and DSP systems, a significant reduction in area, delay, and power can be achieved by producing results that are not correctly rounded. This paper presents an efficient method for designing variable-correction truncated floating point multipliers that produce results with a maximum error of less than one unit in the last place. With this method, several of the less significant columns of the significand multiplier are eliminated and the rounding logic for floating point multiplication is simplified.