Comparative design of floating-point arithmetic units using the Balsa synthesis system

In this paper, the asynchronous floating-point arithmetic units consisting of adders/subtractors and multipliers are designed and compared based on the Balsa synthesis system. For the critical mantissa multiplication in the multiplier, the modified Booth algorithm (radix 2, 4, and 8) is adopted. A pipelined design of the multiplier is also presented to increase performance. Since the Balsa language is compiled using syntax-directed translation, for the two different if statements and one case statement supported by Balsa, three different description styles have been made for each design. It can be seen from the experimental results how the style affects the area cost and simulation time of the resulting circuit. This gives us a guide to choose appropriate control statements for designing Balsa-based asynchronous circuits.