Despite difficulties in general division, magnitude comparison, and sign detection, residue number system arithmetic has been used for many special-purpose systems in light of its parallelism and modularity for the most common arithmetic operations of addition/subtraction and multiplication. Computation in RNS requires modular reduction, both for the initial conversion from binary to RNS and after each operation to bring the result back to within a valid residue range. Use of redundant residues simplifies this critical operation, leading to even faster arithmetic. One type of redundant mod-m residue, that keeps the representational redundancy to the minimum of 1 bit per residue, has the nearly symmetric range (-m,m) and allows two values for each pseudoresidue: 〈x〉m or 〈x〉m - m. We study the extent of simplification and speed-up in the modular reduction process afforded by such redundant residues and discuss its potential implications to the design of RNS arithmetic circuits. In particular, we show that besides cost and performance benefits, introduction of error checking and fault tolerance in arithmetic computations is facilitated when such redundant residues are used.
Parity checking comprises a low-redundancy method for the design of reliable digital systems. While quite effective for detecting single-bit transmission or storage errors, parity encoding has not been widely used for checking the correctness of arithmetic results because parity is not preserved during arithmetic operations and parity prediction requires fairly complex circuits in most cases. We propose a general strategy for designing parity-checked arithmetic circuits that takes advantage of redundant intermediate representations. Because redundancy is often used for high performance anyway, the incremental cost of our proposed method is quite small. Unlike conventional binary numbers, redundant representations can be encoded and manipulated in such a way that parity is preserved in each step. Additionally, lack of carry propagation ensures that the effect of a fault is localized rather than catastrophic. After establishing the framework for our parity-preserving transformations in computer arithmetic, we illustrate some applications of the proposed strategy to the design of parity-checked adder/subtractors, multipliers, and other arithmetic structures used in signal processing.
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