A Multi-Level Structure for High-Precision Binary Decoders

Binary decoders are ubiquitous in digital circuits for computing, particularly within memory addressing and demultiplexing. A commonly used method for constructing binary decoders is the coincident row-column structure, which uses two smaller decoders intersecting over an array of AND gates to generate the output of the decoder as a whole. While this works for the typical sizes of modern computers (under 128 bits), it still has room for improvement. Furthermore, this structure is not scalable to high input precisions, such as above 1024 bits. In this work, we propose a multi-level structure for binary decoders suitable for high-precision inputs, as a generalization of the existing row-column decoder. We compare our novel structure to the aforementioned row-column method, a tree-based structure, and other single-level decoder constructs, and analyze complexity as a function of input precision.