The goal of this project was to create a VLSI design to take the square root of a 16-bit integer number input into the chip and return the 8-bit result to the user. There are many different methods of computing the square root of a number, as discussed in the Wikipedia article below, but many are not suited to a hardware implementation. The algorithm we chose had an elegant hardware implementation and is described further under the Chip Architecture section.
References used on this project:
ACM - A Machine Method for square-root computation
Wittenberg - How the ENIAC took a Square Root
Wikipedia - Methods of Computing Square Roots
Square Root Machine Project at MIT
University of Aizu - New Non-restoring Square Root Algortithm