A BCD-based architecture for fast coordinate rotation

Although radix 10 based arithmetic has been gaining renewed importance over the last few years, decimal systems are not efficient enough and techniques are still under development. In this paper, an improvement of the CORDIC (coordinate rotation digital computer) method for decimal representation is proposed and applied to produce fast rotations. The algorithm uses BCD operands as inputs, combining the advantages of both decimal and binary systems. The result is a reduction of 50% in the number of iterations if compared with the original Decimal CORDIC method. Finally, we present a hardware architecture useful to produce BCD coordinates rotations accurately and fast, and different experiments demonstrating the advantages of the new method are shown. A reduction of 75% in a single stage delay is obtained, whereas the circuit area just increases in about 5%.