Square a number in NASM assembly without multiplication

Question

Is it possible to square a number stored in a register (say eax) without doing any multiplication (by using shifts, etc)? I will be squaring a 16-bit number in 32-bit assembly so overflow shouldn't be an issue. I am using NASM x86 assembly to create the program. Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Shift and Add is always a good starting point for doing multiplications on computers without involving multiplication instructions.

Precomputing a table is another option that could be suitable for this problem.

Answer 2

In C:

int square(int n) {
    int i, r = 0;
    for (i = n; i; i >>= 1, n <<= 1)
        if (i & 1)
            r += n;
    return r;
}

I'll leave the NASM to you.