how to do two complement multiplication and division of integers?

eagertoLearn picture eagertoLearn · Dec 27, 2013 · Viewed 48k times · Source

I have read this post on binary multiplication using two complement. but it is not very clear to me. Even I have difficulty understanding the wiki article on this. I want to know how to go about calculating multiplications of negative numbers:

eg: -1 with -7 should give 7.
A 4-bit, 2's complement of -1 is : 1111
A 4-bit, 2's complement of -7 is : 1001

some step-wise way of calculating the multiplication will be helpful. No article I came across talks about division. How to approach this?

Answer

brain storm picture brain storm · Dec 27, 2013

step 1: sign extend both integers to twice as many bits. This is safe to do, though may not always be necessary.

for 4-bit --> 1111, you would extend as 1111 1111
for 4-bit --> 0111,you would extend as 0000 0111

step 2: do elementary multiplication

sep 3: take the correct number of result bits from the least significant portion of the result.

eg: after multiplication, you end up with something such as 0010011110take the last 8 bits i.e 10011110

Let me illustrate with the example you provided: -1 X -7 in 4-bit representation

         1111 1111        -1
       x 1111 1001     x  -7
      ----------------    ------
          11111111         7
         00000000
        00000000
       11111111
      11111111
     11111111
    11111111
   11111111
   ----------------
1  00000000111       --->  7 (notice the Most significant bit is zer``o)
      --------  (last 8-bits needed) 

you could get more details here;

for division: convert to positive and after the calculation adjust the sign. I will leave this as exercise but you could refer this page.