Expanding Dedicated Multipliers

Those of you with DSP or computationally intensive projects in mind will be most interested in the dedicated multipliers Xilinx Spartan-3 generation FPGA devices have to offer; the potential is enormous, with anything from 3 to 104 available per device.

This white paper describes methods for expanding the natural bit-width capability of dedicated multipliers in a way that will make best use of the complete FPGA resources. This information is applicable to the Spartan-3 generation FPGA families. The same dedicated multiplier is found in the Virtex-II FPGAs and Virtex-II Pro FPGAs, with up to 444 multipliers available.