IOSR Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering (IOSR-JECE)

e-ISSN: 2278-2834,p- ISSN: 2278-8735. Volume 6, Issue 1 (May. - Jun. 2013), PP 01-06
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Design of 32 bit Parallel Prefix Adders

P.Chaitanya kumari1, R.Nagendra2
PG Student, VLSI, Assistant Professor, ECE Dept., SVEC, Tirupati, Chittoor, A.P, India ,

Abstract: In this paper, we propose 32 bit Kogge-Stone, Brent-Kung, Ladner-Fischer parallel prefix adders. In
general N-bit adders like Ripple Carry Adders (slow adders compare to other adders), and Carry Look Ahead
adders (area consuming adders) are used in earlier days. But now the most Industries are using parallel prefix
adders because of their advantages compare to other adders. Parallel prefix adders are faster and area
efficient. Parallel prefix adder is a technique for increasing the speed in DSP processor while performing
addition. We simulate and synthesis different types of 32-bit prefix adders using Xilinx ISE 10.1i tool. By using
these synthesis results, we noted the performance parameters like number of LUTs and delay. We compare these
three adders in terms of LUTs (represents area) and delay values.
Keywords− prefix adder, carry operator, Kogge-Stone, Brent-Kung, Ladner-Fischer.

I. Introduction
Arithmetic circuits are the ones which perform arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction,
multiplication, division, parity calculation. Most of the time, designing these circuits is the same as designing
muxers, encoders and decoders. In electronics, an adder or summer is a digital circuits[7] that performs addition
of numbers. In many computers and other kind of processors, adders are other parts of the processor, many
computers and other kinds of processors, where they are used to calculate addresses, table and similar. The
binary adder[7,10] is the one type of element in most digital circuit designs including digital signal
processors(DSP) and microprocessor data path units. Therefore fast and accurate operation of digital system
depends on the performance of adders [6]. Hence improving the performance of adder is the main area of
research in VLSI[10] system design. The Conventional adders discussed in section II. The details of R Kogge-
Stone adder, Brent-Kung adder and Ladner- Fischer adders are discussed, and the implementation of proposed
system is described in section III. The performance and simulation results were presented and discussed in
section IV.

II. Conventional Adders

Ripple Carry Adder
Ripple Carry Adder is constructed by cascading full adder blocks in series. A RCA is a logic circuit in
which the carry out of one stage fed directly to the carry in of the next stage. It is called RCA because each carry
bit gets rippled into the next stage. The main drawbacks of the ripple adder is every bit being added has to
propagate through each digital logic gate in the circuit before an answer can be generated. This is known as a
gate delay. The 4 bit RCA figure shown below.

Figure1: 4-bit Ripple Carry Adder

Carry Look Ahead Adder

A Carry Look Ahead adder(CLA) is a type of adder used in digital circuits. A carry-look ahead adder
improves speed by reducing the amount of time required to determine carry bits. It can be contrasted with the
simpler, but usually slower, ripple carry adder[16] for which the carry bit is calculated alongside the sum bit,
and each bit must wait until the previous carry has been calculated to begin calculating its own result and carry
bits. The carry-look ahead adder calculates one or more carry bits before the sum, which reduces the wait time
to calculate the result of the larger value bits. The Kogge-Stone adder and Brent-Kung adder and Ladner-
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 Design of 32 bit Parallel Prefix Adders

Fischer[14] are examples of this type of adder. To reduce the computation time, engineers devised faster ways to
add two binary numbers by using carry-look ahead adders. They work by creating two signals (P and G) for
each bit position, based on if a carry is propagated through from a less significant bit position (at least one input
is a '1'), a carry is generated in that bit position (both inputs are '1'), or if a carry is killed in that bit position
(both inputs are '0'). In most cases, P is simply the sum output of a half-adder and G is the carry output of the
same adder. After P and G are generated the carries for every bit position are created. Some advanced carry-
look ahead architectures are the Brent-Kung adder, and the Kogge-Stone adder and Ladner-Fischer adder[5].The
4 bit CLA figure shown below.

Figure2: 4 bit Carry Look Ahead Adder

III. Proposed Adders

Parallel prefix adders
The PPA is like a Carry Look Ahead Adder. The production of the carriers the prefix adders [1] can be
designed in many different ways based on the different requirements. We use tree structure form to increase the
speed [13] of arithmetic operation. Parallel prefix adders are faster adders [1] and these are faster adders [4] and
used for high performance arithmetic structures in industries. The parallel prefix addition is done in 3 steps.
1. Pre-processing stage
2. Carry generation network
3. Post processing stage
Pre-processing stage
In this stage we compute, the generate and propagate signals are used to generate carry input of each adder. A
and B are inputs. These signals are given by the equation 1&2.

Pi=Ai Bi........................(1)
GI=Ai .Bi.............................(2)

Carry generation network]

In this stage we compute carries corresponding to each bit. Execution is done in parallel form [4].After
the computation of carries in parallel they are divided into smaller pieces. carry operator contain two AND gates
, one OR gate. It uses propagate and generate as intermediate signals which are given by the equations 3&4.

P(i:k) =P(i:j) . P(j-1:k)……………………….............(3)

G(i:k) =G(i:j) +(G(j-1:k) . P(i:j))…………………..(4)

Figure3: Carry operator.

The operations involved in this figure are given as.
Post processing stage
This is the final stage to compute the summation of input bits. it is same for all adders and sum bit equation
given
Si= Pi Ci………………………………………..(5)
.
Ci+1=(Pi C0) + Gi………………………………(6)

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 Design of 32 bit Parallel Prefix Adders

Parallel Prefix Adders are classified into

1. Kogge- Stone Adder

2. Brent-Kung Adder
3. Ladner-Fischer Adder

Kogge - Stone Adder

Kogge-Stone adder is a parallel prefix form carry look ahead adder. The Kogge-Stone adder [3] was
developed by peter M. Kogge and Harold S. Stone which they published in 1973. Kogge-Stone prefix adder is
a fast adder design. KS adder has best performance in VLSI implementations. Kogge-Stone adder has large area
with minimum fan-out. The Kogge- Stone adder is widely known as a parallel prefix adder that performs fast
logical addition. Kogge-Stone adder[9] is used for wide adders because of it shows the less delay among other
architectures. In fig2 each vertical stage produce Propagate and Generate bits. Generate bits are produced in the
last stage and these bits are XORed with the initial propagate after the input to produce the sum bits. The 2-bit
and 32- bit Kogge- Stone adder figures shown below.

Figure4: 2-bit KS Adder

Figure 5: 32-bit Kogge-Stone Adder

Brent-Kung Adder
The Brent-Kung adder[3] is a parallel prefix adder. The Brent-Kung adder was developed by Brent
and Kung which they published in 1982. Brent-Kung has maximum logic depth and minimum area. The number
of cells are calculated by using 2(n-1) -Log2n .The 4-bit and 32 bit Brent- Kung adder figures shown below.

Figure 6: 4-bit BK Adder

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 Design of 32 bit Parallel Prefix Adders

Figure7: 32-bit Brent-kung adder

Ladner-Fischer Adder
Ladner- Fischer adder is a parallel prefix adder. This was developed by R. Ladner and M. Fischer in
1980.Ladner- Fischer adder[6] has minimum logic depth but it has large fan-out . Ladner- Fischer adder has
carry operator nodes. The 3-bit and 32 bit Ladner- Fischer adder figures shown below.

Figure8: 3-bit LF Adder

Figure9: 32- bit Ladner- Fischer adder

IV. Simulation Results And Comparisions

Various adders were designed using Verilog language in Xilinx ISE Navigator 10.1 and all the
simulations are performed using Modelsim 6.5e simulator. The performance[12] of proposed adders are
analyzed and compared. In this proposed architecture , the implementation code for 32-bit Kogge-Stone, Brent-
Kung adder, Ladner-Fischer adders were developed and corresponding values of delay and area were observed.
Table1 shows the trade-off between different topologies and table2 shows the comparision of adders. The
simulated outputs of 32-bit proposed adders are shown in Figure8,9&10.

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 Design of 32 bit Parallel Prefix Adders

Figure8: Simulated Output of 32-bit KS Adder

Figure9: Simulated Output of 32-bit BK Adder

Figure10: Simulated Output of 32-bit LF Adder

V. Conclusion
The proposed adders are faster because of less delay and area efficient compared to other basic adders.
Among these three prefix adders Ladner-Fischer adder has better performance compared to remaining adders.
The performance comparisons between these adders are measured in terms of area and delay. It would be

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 Design of 32 bit Parallel Prefix Adders

interesting to investigate the design of the 128 and 256 bit adders. These adders are popularly used in VLSI
implementations.

Acknowledgement
P. Chaitanya Kumari would like to thank Mr.R .Nagendra, Assistant Professor(senior grade)
ECE Department who had been guiding throughout the project and supporting me in giving technical ideas
about the paper and motivating me to complete the work efficiently and successfully.

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