A Cordic-based Architecture for High Performance Decimal Calculations

Decimal arithmetic supported by digital computers has been gaining renewed importance over the last few years. However, the development of high performance radix 10-based systems is still incipient. In this paper, a modification of the CORDIC method for decimal arithmetic is proposed. The resulting algorithm works with radix 10 operands and combines decimal arithmetic with elementary angles so as to reduce the number of iterations required to achieve certain precision. Different experiments showing the advantages of the new method compared with the original decimal CORDIC method are also described. Finally, an architecture for the method implemented on FPGA is proposed.