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In this work, we present a radix-10 division unit that is based on the digit-recurrence algorithm. The previous decimal division designs do not include recent developments in the theory and practice of this type of algorithm, which were developed for radix-2 k dividers. In addition to the adaptation of these features, the radix-10 quotient digit is decomposed into a radix-2 digit and a radix-5 digit in such a way that only five and two times the divisor are required in the recurrence. Moreover, the most significant slice of the recurrence, which includes the selection function, is implemented in radix-2, avoiding the additional delay introduced by the radix-10 carry-save additions and allowing the balancing of the paths to reduce the cycle delay. The results of the implementation of the proposed radix-10 division unit show that its latency is close to that of radix-16 division units (comparable dynamic range of significands) and it has a shorter latency than a radix-10 unit based on the Newton-Raphson approximation.

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The energy consumption due to input-output pins is a substantial part of the overall chip consumption. To reduce this energy, this work presents the working-zone encoding (WZE) method for encoding an external address bus, based on the conjecture that programs favor a few working zones of their address space at each instant. In such cases, the method identifies these zones and sends through the bus only the offset of this reference with respect to the previous reference to that zone, along with an identifier of the current working zone. This is combined with a one-hot encoding for the offset. Several improvements to this basic strategy are also described. The approach has been applied to several address streams, broken down into instructiononly, data-only, and instruction-data traces, to evaluate the effect on separate and shared address buses. Moreover, the effect of instruction and data caches is evaluated. For the case without caches, the proposed scheme is specially beneficial for dataaddress and shared buses, which are the cases where other codings are less effective. On the other hand, for the case with caches the best scheme for the instruction-only and data-only traces is the WZE, whereas for the instruction-data traces it is either the WZE or the bus-invert with four groups (depending on the energy overhead of these techniques).

The energy consumption at the I of the overall chip consumption. 4 0 pins is a significant part his paper presents a method for encoding an external address bus which lowers its activity and, thus, decreases the energy. This method relies on the locality of memory references. Since applications favor a few working zones of their address space at each instant, for an address to one of these zones only the offset of this reference with respect to the previous reference to that zone needs to be sent over the bus, along with an identifier of the current working zone. This is combined with a modified one-hot encoding for the offset. An estimate of the area and energy overhead of the encoder/decoder are given; their effect is small. The approach has been applied to two memory-intensive examples, obtaining a bus-activity reduction of about.2 3 in both of them. Comparisons are given with previous metho L for bus encoding, showing significant improvement.