Applications of Redundant Number Representations to Decimal Arithmetic

A decimal arithmetic unit is proposed for both integer and floating-point computations. To achieve comparable speed to a binary arithmetic unit, the decimal unit is based on a redundant number representation. With this representation no loss of compactness is made relative to binary coded decimal (BCD) form. In this paper the hardware required for the implementation of the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are described and the properties of floating-point arithmetic based on a redundant number representation are investigated.