Current-Mode Carry-Free Multiplier Design using a Memristor-Transistor Crossbar Architecture
Shengqi Yu1,a, Ahmed Soltan2,b, Rishad Shafik1,c, Thanasin Bunnam1, Fei Xia1, Domenico Balsamo1 and Alex Yakovlev1
1Microsystems Research Group, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
2NISC Group, Nile university, Al Sheikh Zayed, Giza, Egypt
as.yu10@ncl.ac.uk
basoltan@nu.edu.eg
cRishad.Shafik@ncl.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
Multipliers are a major energy and delay contributor in modern compute-intensive applications due to their complex logic architecture. As such, designing multipliers with reduced energy and faster speed has remained a thoroughgoing challenge. This paper presents a novel, carry-free multiplier, which is suitable for a new-generation of energy-constrained applications. The multiplier circuit consists of an array of memristor-transistor cells that can be selected (i.e., turned ON or OFF) using a combination of DC bias voltages based on the operand values. When a cell is selected it contributes to current in the array path, which is then amplified by current mirrors with variable transistor gate sizes. The different current paths are connected to a node for analogously accumulating the currents to produce the multiplier output directly. This removes the need for latency-sensitive carry propagation stages, typically seen in traditional multipliers. We conduct a number of experiments to validate the functional and parametric properties. Our experiments showed that proposed multiplier achieves 51.44% savings in energy at a similar accuracy when compared with recently proposed approaches.
Keywords: Mixed-signal, Current-mode multiplier, Memristor-transistor crossbar, Energy Efficiency.
