A Unified Architecture for BCD and Binary Adder/Subtractor

The need to have hardware support for decimal arithmetic is increasing in recent years because of the growth in the decimal data processing in commercial, financial and internet based applications. In this paper a new architecture for efficient Binary coded decimal (BCD) addition/subtraction is presented that can be reconfigured to perform binary addition/subtraction. The architecture is mainly designed, keeping in mind the signed magnitude format. The proposed architecture avoids the usage of additional 2´s complement and 10´s complement circuitry, for correcting the results to sign magnitude format. The architecture is run-time reconfigurable to facilitate both BCD and Binary operations. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture is 13.6% better in terms of delay than the existing design.