A new architecture for high performance digit-serial vector inner product (VIP) which can be pipelined to the bit-level is introduced. The design of the digit-serial vector inner product is based on a new systematic design methodology usingradix-2{sup}n arithmetic. The proposed architecture allows a high level of bit-level pipelining to increase the throughput rate with minimum initial delay and minimum area. This will give designers greater flexibility in finding the best tradeoff betweenhardware cost and throughput rate. It is shown that sub-digit pipelined digit-serial structure can achieve a higher throughput rate with much less area consumption than an equivalent bit-parallel structure.A twin-pipe architecture to double the throughput rate of digit-serial multipliers and consequently that of the digit-serial vector inner product is also presented. The effect of the number of pipelining levels and the twin-pipe architecture on thethroughput rate and hardware cost are discussed. A two's complement digit-serial architecture which can operate on both negative and positive numbers is also presented.
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