Modern digital communication systems rely heavily on baseband signal processing for in-phase and quadrature (I-Q) channels, and complex number processing in low-voltage CMOS has become a necessity for channel equalization, timing recovery, modulation, and demodulation. In this work, redundant binary (RB) arithmetic is applied to complex number multiplication for the first time so that an N-bit parallel complex number multiplier can be reduced to two RE multiplications (i.e., an addition of N RB partial products) corresponding to real and imaginary parts, respectively. This efficient RE encoding scheme proposed can generate RB partial products with no additional hardware and delay overheads. A prototype 8-bit complex number multiplier containing 11.5 K transistors is integrated on 1.05/spl times/1.33 mm/sup 2/ using 0.8 /spl mu/m CMOS. The chip consumes 90 mW with 2.5 V supply when clocked at 200 MHz.