A novel low power multiplication algorithm for reducing switching activity through operand decomposition is proposed. Our experimental results show 12% to 18% reduction in logic transitions in both array multipliers and tree multipliers of 32 bits and 64 bits. Similar results are obtained for dynamic power dissipation after logic synthesis. One additional logic gate is required on the critical path for operand decomposition, which corresponds to only an additional 2% to 6% of total delay in these four cases. Thus, the proposed algorithm can be applied to many digital systems where power consumption is a major design constraint.