Impact of MAC Unit Design Architectures and Their Applications in Modern Computing: An In-Depth Review

Jan 1, 2026 by Sudheer Vishwakarma, Zaheer Khan, Janne J. Lehtomäki (IEEE Access)

A fundamental computational block essential for computing devices is the multiplier-accumulator (MAC) unit. A MAC unit repeatedly performs a multiply and add operation commonly used in many data processing and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. This article comprehensively analyzes MAC unit architectures, focusing on high-throughput configurations such as systolic arrays and tree-based multipliers integrated into AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and digital signal processing (DSP) hardware.