  Today every circuit has to face the power consumption issue for both portable
device aiming at large battery life and high end circuits avoiding cooling
packages and reliability issues that are too complex. It is generally accepted
that during logic synthesis power tracks well with area. This means that a
larger design will generally consume more power. The multiplier is an important
kernel of digital signal processors. Because of the circuit complexity, the
power consumption and area are the two important design considerations of the
multiplier. In this paper a low power low area architecture for the shift and
add multiplier is proposed. For getting the low power low area architecture,
the modifications made to the conventional architecture consist of the
reduction in switching activities of the major blocks of the multiplier, which
includes the reduction in switching activity of the adder and counter. This
architecture avoids the shifting of the multiplier register. The simulation
result for 8 bit multipliers shows that the proposed low power architecture
lowers the total power consumption by 35.25% and area by 52.72 % when compared
to the conventional architecture. Also the reduction in power consumption
increases with the increase in bit width.
