A study of arithmetic circuits and the effect of utilising Reed-Muller techniques

Guan, Zhigang

Abstract

Reed-Muller algebraic techniques, as an alternative means in logic design, became more attractive recently, because of their compact representations of logic functions and yielding of easily testable circuits. It is claimed by some researchers that Reed-Muller algebraic techniques are particularly suitable for arithmetic circuits. In fact, no practical application in this field can be found in the open literature.
This project investigates existing Reed-Muller algebraic techniques and explores their application in arithmetic circuits. The work described in this thesis is concerned with practical applications in arithmetic circuits, especially for minimizing logic circuits at the transistor level. These results are compared with those obtained using the conventional Boolean algebraic techniques. This work is also related to wider fields, from logic level design to layout level design in CMOS circuits, the current leading technology in VLSI. The emphasis is put on circuit level (transistor level) design. The results show that, although Boolean logic is believed to be a more general tool in logic design, it is not the best tool in all situations. Reed-Muller logic can generate good results which can't be easily obtained by using Boolean logic.
F or testing purposes, a gate fault model is often used in the conventional implementation of Reed-Muller logic, which leads to Reed-Muller logic being restricted to using a small gate set. This usually leads to generating more complex circuits. When a cell fault model, which is more suitable for regular and iterative circuits, such as arithmetic circuits, is used instead of the gate fault model in Reed-Muller logic, a wider gate set can be employed to realize Reed-Muller functions. As a result, many circuits designed using Reed-Muller logic can be comparable to that designed using Boolean logic. This conclusion is demonstrated by testing many randomly generated functions.
The main aim of this project is to develop arithmetic circuits for practical application. A number of practical arithmetic circuits are reported. The first one is a carry chain adder. Utilising the CMOS circuit characteristics, a simple and high speed carry chain is constructed to perform the carry operation. The proposed carry chain adder can be reconstructed to form a fast carry skip adder, and it is also found to be a good application for residue number adders. An algorithm for an on-line adder and its implementation are also developed. Another circuit is a parallel multiplier based on 5:3 counter. The simulations show that the proposed circuits are better than many previous designs, in terms of the number of transistors and speed. In addition, a 4:2 compressor for a carry free adder is investigated. It is shown that the two main schemes to construct the 4:2 compressor have a unified structure. A variant of the Baugh and Wooley algorithm is also studied and generalized in this work.

Thesis Type	Thesis
Deposit Date	Apr 15, 2011
Peer Reviewed	Not Peer Reviewed
Keywords	Reed-Muller; logic design; arithmetic circuits; logic circuits; CMOS; carry chain;
Public URL	http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/4340
Contract Date	Apr 15, 2011
Award Date	1995-09

A study of arithmetic circuits and the effect of utilising Reed-Muller techniques

Guan, Zhigang

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