Design and implementation of a CORDIC rotator and software integration for low-power exponent computation

The current trends of mobile battery-powered devices make area and power critical design constraints in many applications. It is important that embedded software implementations execute any given task as power efficiently as possible. These tasks often require the computation of transcendental functions (sine, cosine, exponential, logarithm, etc.). The CORDIC algorithm can be used to implement an area-efficient hardware accelerator to assist in the computation of many of these functions while reducing the total energy consumed. This report presents the design and implementation of a fixed-point CORDIC rotator. The CORDIC rotator is used to assist in the computation of IEEE-754 single-precision floating-point exponentials. Power simulation results show the CORDIC-assisted exponent computation consumes 81.42% less energy as compared with the unassisted software solution while adding less than 10% to the gate count of the original system.