Reducing multiplier energy by data-driven voltage variation

Design of portable battery operated multimedia devices requires energy-efficient multiplication circuits. This paper proposes a new technique to reduce power consumption of digital multipliers. In contrast to related methods which concentrate on transition activity reduction, we focus on dynamic reduction of supply voltage. Two implementation schemes capable of dynamically adjusting a double voltage supply to input data variation are presented. Simulations show that using these schemes we can reduce energy consumption of 16×16 bit multiplier in DCT computation by 33.4% and 25.2% on average without any speed degradation and as low as 4.7% area overhead.