ADDER
In electronics, an adder or summer is a digital circuit that performs addition of
numbers. In modern computers adders reside in the arithmetic logic unit (ALU)
where other operations are performed. Although adders can be constructed for
many numerical representations, such as Binary-coded decimal or excess-3, the
most common adders operate on binary numbers. In cases where twos complement
or ones complement is being used to represent negative numbers, it is trivial to
modify an adder into an adder-subtracter. Other signed number representations
require a more complex adder.
Types of adders
For single bit adders, there are two general types.
A half adder has two inputs, generally labelled A and B, and two outputs, the sum
S and carry C. S is the two-bit XOR of A and B, and C is the AND of A and B.
Essentially the output of a half adder is the sum of two one-bit numbers, with C
being the most significant of these two outputs.
A full adder has three inputs - A, B, and a carry in C, such that multiple adders can
be used to add larger numbers. To remove ambiguity between the input and output
carry lines, the carry in is labelled Ci or Cin while the carry out is labelled Co or
Cout.
Half adder
Half adder circuit diagram
A half adder is a logical circuit that performs an addition operation on two binary
digits. The half adder produces a sum and a carry value which are both binary
digits.
The drawback of this circuit is that in case of a multibit addition, it cannot include
a carry.
Following is the logic table for a half adder:
ABCS
0 0 0 0
0 1 0 1
1 0 0 1
1 1 1 0
Full adder
Inputs: {A, B, CarryIn} → Outputs: {Sum, CarryOut}
Schematic symbol for a 1-bit full adder
A full adder is a logical circuit that performs an addition operation on three binary
digits. The full adder produces a sum and carry value, which are both binary digits.
It can be combined with other full adders (see below) or work on its own.
Input Output
A B Ci Co S
0 0 0 0 0
0 0 1 0 1
0 1 0 0 1
0 1 1 1 0
1 0 0 0 1
1 0 1 1 0
1 1 0 1 0
1 1 1 1 1
Note that the final OR gate before the carry-out output may be replaced by an XOR
gate without altering the resulting logic. This is because the only difference
between OR and XOR gates occurs when both inputs are 1; for the adder shown
here, this is never possible. Using only two types of gates is convenient if one
desires to implement the adder directly using common IC chips.
A full adder can be constructed from two half adders by connecting A and B to the
input of one half adder, connecting the sum from that to an input to the second
adder, connecting Ci to the other input and OR the two carry outputs. Equivalently,
S could be made the three-bit xor of A, B, and Ci and Co could be made the three-
bit majority function of A, B, and Ci. The output of the full adder is the two-bit
arithmetic sum of three one-bit numbers.
Multiple-bit adders
Ripple carry adder
It is possible to create a logical circuit using multiple full adders to add N-bit
numbers. Each full adder inputs a Cin, which is the Cout of the previous adder. This
kind of adder is a ripple carry adder, since each carry bit "ripples" to the next full
adder. Note that the first (and only the first) full adder may be replaced by a half
adder.
4-bit ripple carry adder circuit diagram
The layout of ripple carry adder is simple, which allows for fast design time;
however, the ripple carry adder is relatively slow, since each full adder must wait
for the carry bit to be calculated from the previous full adder. The gate delay can
easily be calculated by inspection of the full adder circuit. Following the path from
Cin to Cout shows 2 gates that must be passed through. Therefore, a 32-bit adder
requires 31 carry computations and the final sum calculation for a total of 31 * 2 +
1 = 63 gate delays.
Carry look-ahead adders
To reduce the computation time, engineers devised faster ways to add two binary
numbers by using carry lookahead adders. They work by creating two signals (P
and G) for each bit position, based on whether 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 lookahead architectures are the
Manchester carry chain, Brent-Kung adder, and the Kogge-Stone adder.
4-bit adder with Carry Look Ahead
Some other multi-bit adder architectures break the adder into blocks. It is possible
to vary the length of these blocks based on the propagation delay of the circuits to
optimize computation time. These block based adders include the carry bypass
adder which will determine P and G values for each block rather than each bit, and
the carry select adder which pre-generates sum and carry values for either possible
carry input to the block.
Lookahead Carry Unit
By combining multiple carry look-ahead adders even larger adders can be created.
This can be used at multiple levels to make even larger adders. For example, the
following adder is a 64-bit adder that uses 4 16-bit CLAs with two levels of LCUs.
A 64-bit adder
3:2 compressors
We can view a full adder as a 3:2 compressor: it sums three one-bit inputs, and
returns the result as a single two-bit number. Thus, for example, an input of 101
results in an output of 1+0+1=10 (2). The carry-out represents bit one of the
result, while the sum represents bit zero. Likewise, a half adder can be used as a
2:2 compressor.
3:2 compressors can be used to speed up the summation of three or more addends.
If the addends are exactly three, the layout is known as the carry-save adder. If the
addends are four or more, more than one layer of compressors is necessary and
there are various possible design for the circuit: the most common are Dadda and
Wallace trees. This kind of circuit is most notably used in multipliers, which is
why these circuits are also known as Dadda and Wallace multipliers.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Types of adders
o Half adder
o Full adder
Multiple-bit adders
o Ripple carry adder
o Carry look-ahead adders
o Lookahead Carry Unit
compressors
