Abstract
A Hamming distance comparator (also known as \(k\)-order comparator) compares its two operands and outputs an agreement if they differ in less than \(k\) corresponding bits. In this paper, we introduce novel architectures for the design of Hamming distance \(k\) comparators, for the usually adopted values 2 or 3 for \(k\). The proposed architectures are fully digital and are based on splitting the difference vector in smaller groups and performing comparison against \(k\) in parallel with counting, leading to significant speedup against previous proposals. The derived architectures can also be used for fixed-threshold Hamming weight comparators for small or large threshold values. The proposed 2- and 3-order comparators are more than 60 and 31 % more efficient than the most competitive previous proposal, respectively, using the area \(\times \) time\(^2\) metric, while their total power dissipation remains low.
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Vergos, H.T., Bakalis, D. & Anastasiou, A. Lookahead Architectures for Hamming Distance and Fixed-Threshold Hamming Weight Comparators. Circuits Syst Signal Process 34, 1041–1056 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-014-9891-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-014-9891-5