Comparing squaring and cubing units with multipliers

With power becoming a precious resource in current VLSI systems, performance per Watt has become a more important metric than chip area. With a large number of applications benefitting from support for complex functional units like squaring and cubing, it becomes imperative that such functions be implemented in hardware. Implementing these functions using existing general purpose multipliers in a design may result in area savings in some cases but results in power and latency penalties. We propose to use dedicated hardware accelerators like squaring and cubing units to perform squares and cubes, respectively. We study the trade-off for computing squares and cubes using a general purpose multiplier versus dedicated units from a software perspective. We compare area and power requirements for various widths. We are able to reduce power consumption per computation by more than 50% in squaring units and more than 40% in cubing units using dedicated units. Depending on the requirements of the applications, dedicated squaring and cubing units can also aid multipliers in improving the performance and latency of various applications.