A Low-Latency CORDIC Algorithm Based on Pre-Rotation and Its Application on Computation of Arctangent Function

Abstract

This paper presents a low-latency coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm to accelerate the computation of arctangent functions, and it describes the corresponding iterative and pipelined architecture of this novel algorithm. As compared to the existing methods based on CORDIC, the proposed method can effectively reduce the number of iterations by dedicated pre-rotation and comparison processes. Moreover, the proposed CORDIC algorithm supports all vectors with arbitrary angles while maintaining convergence. By error analysis, the proposed algorithm can achieve the same accuracy as the conventional CORDIC algorithm during floating-point arctangent function computation and reduce the number of iterations by approximately 50%. This paper presents two new architectures—the iterative architecture, which can be more resource efficient, and the pipelined architecture, which can achieve a throughput rate of one datum per clock. Finally, the experimental comparison results indicate that the proposed method outperforms extant methods as it exhibits low latency, requires fewer resources to compute the arctangent function for floating-point inputs, and necessitates no digital signal processing (DSP) and memory for fixed-point inputs.