Digit-serial online arithmetic for high-speed digital signal processing applications

This paper is concerned with an overview of the salient features of combining the online and digit-serial arithmetic techniques for the design, development, and hardware implementation of algorithms for high-speed arithmetic operations. The online technique processes digital signals as generated and consumed by current practical analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. The digit-serial technique permits a trade-off between speed and area in a corresponding hardware implementation. As online operations require redundant representations, carries do not propagate through long paths, thereby reducing the delays in hardware implementation. Moreover, the most significant digits of the result of an online operation can be fed as the inputs to other online operations after a small number of bit-serial clock cycles called latency. The area of online operations was a concern in the past, but one can now circumvent this problem by employing the digit-serial technique.