A configurable divider using digit recurrence

The division operation is essential in many digital signal processing algorithms. For a hardware implementation, the requirements and constraints on the divider circuit differ significantly with different applications. Therefore, it is not possible to design one divider component having optimal performance and cost for all target applications. Instead, the presented divider has a modular architecture, based on instantiation of small efficient divider subblocks. The configuration of the divider architecture is set by a number of parameters controlling wordlength, number of quotient bits, number of clock cycles per operation, and fixed or floating point operation. Digit recurrence algorithms with carry save arithmetic and on-the-fly two's complement output quotient conversion are used to make the sub-blocks small, fast and power efficient. The modularity gives the designer freedom to elaborate different parameters to explore the design space. Two applications using the proposed divider are presented. Furthermore, an example divider circuit has been fabricated and performance measurements are included.