Multiplication and inner product with field programmable gate arrays

Digital signal processing (DSP) applications commonly depend on multiplication and inner product operations in varying precisions. Creating application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for these operations can be too expensive or too time consuming while off-the-shelf programmable DSP chips may have insufficient performance. As an alternative solution for application-specific designs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer hardware reconfigurability with the ease of software programming. This paper explores variable precision multiplication and inner product computations with the Xilinx XC4010 FPGA. We present a modular approach that is easily tailored to any precision.