ARCHITECTURE FOR CORDIC ALGORITHM REALIZATION WITHOUT

ROM LOOKUP TABLES

Chuen-Yau Chen and Wen-Chih Liu

Department of Electronic Engineering, I-Shou University

Kaohsiung, 84008, Taiwan, Republic of China
Email: cychen@ieee.org

ABSTRACT are replaced by a ROM lookup table which contains

This paper proposed architecture for implementing the
CORDIC algorithm. By decomposing an arbitrary rota-
tion angle into a sequence of coarse angles (each of whose
tangent value is a power of 2) and a fine angle which is
small enough, this architecture can be implemented by
performing a sequence of shift-and-add operations in the
radix-2 system without any ROM lookup table or real
multiplication requirement. It is suitable to be designed
in pipelined architecture for performing the high-speed
operations.
1. INTRODUCTION
Sine and cosine are the trigonometric functions which
play the important roles in many fields of applications,
especially in the control systems and communication sys-
tems. For examples, it might be treated as a carrier to
modulate the signal for transmitting on a specific chan-
nel.
With regard to the generation or computation of the
sine and cosine functions, there have been many schemes
proposed [l]. Most of these schemes are developed on
the Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer (CORDIC)
the pre-computed values of all the possible summations
of the ATR terms as mentioned in the mixed-hybrid
CORDIC method. Although the quart-wave symme-
try properties of the sinelcosine functions have been
adopted to compress the size of ROM [2], the size of
the ROM lookup table grows exponentially with the in-
creasing of the precision of the angle.
The work in this paper is motivated by the develop-
ment of the partitioned-hybrid CORDIC methods and
concerned with the reduction of the size of the ROM
lookup table even removing the ROM lookup table com-
pletely. In this proposed architecture, all the multiplica-
tions become the radix-2 multiplications which can be
easily realized by the shift-and-add operations in the
radix-2 system.
2. SINE/COSINE COMPUTATIONS
In the X-Y plane, a point ( X , Y ) = (rcost9,rsinO) can
be viewed as by rotating an angle of 0 counterclockwise
along the circle of a radius of T centered at the origin
from the point (X0,Yo) = (rcos0,rsinO) = ( ~ ~ 0This ) .
operation can be expressed 51s

] [:
;]
algorithm [3], [4]. CORDIC algorithm computes the val-

[ case
ues of sine and cosine based on the property of rotating a
[ ]
-sine
given angle from an initial point around the origin on the = sine case
X-Y plane. Then, the X-coordinate and Y-coordinate
of the resulting point are the sine and cosine of the given
angle, respectively. Schemes based on CORDIC algo-
rithm can be classified into two categories. The first
In (I), if the arbitrary angle 0 is expressed as the linear
one is called the mixed-hybrid CORDIC method, and
combination of the angle where tanek is known in
the second one is called the partitioned-hybrid CORDIC
priori, the resulting point (X, Y) = ( rcos 8 , T sin e) can
method [6]. In the mixed-hybrid CORDIC methods,
be obtained by decomposing the rotation of 0 into a
the real multiplications are required to accomplish the
sequence of subrotations of e k , and (cos 8, sin 0) will be
ArcTangent Radix (ATR) part subrotations, which de-
obtained in turn. That is,
grades the operating speed of the whole stage. In addi-
tional, from the hardware viewpoints, the multipliers in-
duce a large hardware overhead. In the partition-hybrid
CORDIC methods, the multiplications of the ATR part

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and Accordingly, the rotation in (1) can be partitioned into
two cascaded stages. The first stage is
N

k=O
1
-tanukek
1
1) [ 2]
where K = cosu&, . . . cos U N e N is a constant, N is the
number of subrotations, and uk E { -1,O, 1) determines
the direction of each subrotation [3].
2.1. The C O R D I C Algorithm
From the digital computation viewpoint, CORDIC algo-
rithm takes advantage of the property that decomposes
a rotation into a sequence of subrotations to develop an
approach that reaches the target angle e by applying
successive subrotations [3], [4]. In CORDIC algorithm,
a positive angle 8 is represented in an N-bit binary num-
ber as
I table.
N
(3) X M = X O- YOtan u M O M
YM = YO+ X Otan U M e M , (9)
and the second stage is
X = X M - YM tanaL8L
Y = YM + X M tanuLeL.
Clearly, the second stage computation can be easily real-
ized by a sequence of shift-and-add operations in radix-2
numbering system because BL is small enough so that
the value of t a n 9 ~can be approximated by BL that is
a power of 2 [6]. However, the first stage computations
involve multiplying tanBM on the datapath, which be-
comes the bottleneck of this method. These multiplica-
tion operations are usually replaced by a ROM lookup

(4) 2.3. The Proposed Modified Coarse-Fine Rota-

k=l tion Method
where bk is the bit in the radix-2 numbering system with In order to reduce the size of the ROM lookup table in
the weight of 2-k and e k = 2-k represents the positional the coarse-fine rotation method, we treat 4 0 in (5) as
power-of-two weight. By applying the angle recoding the initial angle and decompose the coarse angle OM as
process, 8 can be rewritten as [5] follows:
-
N -
N

eM = X e M k =C ( e H k f 6Lk) (11)
k=2 k=2

where 40 is constant and rk E {-1,l). where 6 M k is defined as

8&Jk = 2-k, (12)

2.2. The Coarse-Fine Rotation Method
6Hk is the angle that should satisify
In this method, an arbitrary angle is first mapped from
the full range [0,27r]to B E [O,?] according to the quarter- taneHk = 2-k (13)
wave symmetry property of the sinelcosine functions. and
Then, the angle 0 is partitioned into two terms expressed
as [lo] eLk = 6 M k - e H k = 6Mk - arctan 2- k (14)
is treated as the error correction term. Substitute (11)
into (6), and the angle 6 can be rewritten as
where t9M is the coarse subangle that can be expressed -
N

as
k=2
3 N
= bkak (7)
k=l
k=2
and Or, is the fine subangle that can be expressed as
where BEL is defined as
N

0~ = bk2k. (8) 6CL

k=g+l k=2

IV-545
 Number of bits Number of Address of Address of Number of
N address bits the first word the final word words
16 4 0000 1100 13
17 4 0000 1100 13
18 5 00000 11001 26
19 5 00000 11001 26
20 5 00000 11001 26
21 6 000000 110010 51
22 6 000000 110010 51
23 6 000000 110010 51
24 7 0000000 1100100 101
25 7 0000000 1100100 101
26 7 0000000 1100100 101

for convenience. With regard to e H k , it is inherently a e

/A-__
power of 2. As to &L, it may be either small enough
OM 9L
or with a carry in the f - t h stage. If it is small enough, .-
I LookupTable(R0M) 'I I shin&AddStages'l
of course it can be realized by a sequence of shift-and-
add operations; otherwise, the OH+ should be rotated Kcosa
again to realize the carry, and the remain of OcL can Ksina0 sin e
be realized by a sequence of shift-and-add operations.
As a whole, the rotation of OM in (6) can be realized b, 4 b, b. b,
by a sequence of shift-and-add operations in the radix-2 1 1 I 1 I
tan- tan- tan- tan- -
system. Therefore, neither the ROM lookup table nor 4 8 16 32 2"

the real multiplication operation is required.

I 13-word ROM I
3. A R C H I T E C T U R E
Address 1 X Y

3.1. The ROM-Based A r c h i t e c t u r e for the Coarse-

Fine Rotation Method

In the coarse-fine rotation method, the bottleneck is

1:;
..
m

.. .......

IIM)
.

/010110101I01l1l0I001l0
.

1
101 I 1 1111 11101010101010 00000011Ill I 1 I 1 1101010

ooo1 io1 I I 1 1 I101 10l01011~10 m101111111011000000

oIollolm1111M)11M)l
__-.____

that the requirement of multipliers to generate the prod-
uct terms XOtan OM and YOtan OM where the value of
taneM is itself needed to be computed. Figure 1 shows
a ROM-Based architecture [5]. In this architecturp, $0
in (5) is treated as the initial angle, and the information
for the rotation of the coarse angle OM is built in a 13-
word ROM, each word contains one value of tanOM for
13 possible O M ' s . Obviously, as shown in Table 1, for the
precision improvement, the number of bits used should
increase, the size of ROM will grows exponentially which
becomes a large overhead from the hardware implemen-
tation viewpoint. Figure 2 is a graphic representation
showing this trend.
i 1
Figure 1: The ROM-based architecture for the coarse-
fine rotation method [5].
3.2. The ROM-less A r c h i t e c t u r e for the Modi-
fied Coarse-Fine Rotation Method
In the modified coarse-fine rotation method, since we de-
composed e into the sum of ~ ; = ~ e Hand k ecL where
tant?Hk is a power of 2 and OxL is small enough such
that tani3cL can be approximated by OcL, we can re-
alize the whole rotation by an all radix-2 shift-and-add
datapath architecture as shown in Fig. 3. In this fig-

IV-546
 Number of X,Y values stored in ROM table or performing the real multiplication operations on
120 I 1 the datapath. The hardware realization can be arranged
5 100
in pipelined architecture t o speed up the operation. The
precision can be increased t o a satisfactory level with-
0
4 80 0
out a large hardware overhead. In the future, by suitably
configuring this design with other functional cores, such
: z i; : o20
as D/A, low-pass filter, we can implement a direct digital
frequency synthesizer.
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Number of bits 5. REFERENCES

J. Vankka, “Methods of mapping from phase to

Figure 2: The size of ROM lookup table increases with
the precision in the ROM-based architecture.
---e-eL
Figure 3: The proposed ROM-less all radix-2 stages ar-
chitecture for the modified coarse-fine rotation method.
ure, the multiplication of tan eMk that was implemented
by a 13-word ROM lookup table as shown in Fig. 1 is
replaced by f stages of shift-and-add operations. From
the hardware realization viewpoint, since the whole data
path are operated with shift-and-add operations without
any real multiplication or ROM lookup table, it is real
suitable to realize the whole system in pipelined archi-
tecture. Therefore, the operating speed will be faster
than the ROM-based one, and the hardware overhead
will be also smaller.
4. CONCLUSION
We have proposed architecture to implement the CORDIC
algorithm in a more efficient manner in this paper. By
decomposing the rotation angle into a sequence of sub-
angles that are either small enough or with a power-of-2
tangent amplitude, the whole rotation can be accom-
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