SIGN DETECTION IN RESIDUE ARITHMETIC UNITS

The parallelism of computation, that characterizes some operations in residue number systems (RNS), is heavily reduced in operations as divi sion, magnitude and sign detection, since numbers must be converted to the weighted system thus reducing efficiency, in spite of the efforts to speed up the conversion. In this work the problem of detecting the sign of numbers represented in RNS is considered and a procedure is d evised, which keeps numbers in residue notation, and requires a redund ant modulus m(p+1) greater than or equal to 2. A sign detecting circui t is also designed that, merely to speed up the operation, exploits a further redundant modulus m(r) greater than or equal to p in the signe d number representation. Circuit response time is evaluated, both from the complexity point of view and in a finite case, where 50 gate dela ys are estimated for a range [-2(64), 2(64) - 1]. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sc ience B.V. All rights reserved.