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In electronics, an adder is a device which will perform the addition, S, of two numbers. In computing the adder is part of the ALU, and some ALUs contain multiple adders. Although adders can be constructed for many numerical representations, such as BCD or excess-3, the most common adders operate on binary numbers. In cases where two's complement is being used to represent negative numbers it is trivial to modify an adder into an adder-subtracterFor single bit adders, there are two general types. A half adder has two inputs, generally labeled A and B, and two outputs, the sum S and carry output Co. S is the two-bit xor of A and B, and Co is the two-bit and of A and B. Essentially the output of a half adder is the two-bit arithmatic sum of two one-bit numbers, with Co being the most significant of these two outputs.
The other type of single bit adder is the full adder which is like a half adder, but takes an additional input carry Ci. 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 arithmatic sum of three one-bit numbers.
The purpose of the carry input on the full-adder is to allow multiple full-adders to be chained together with the carry output of one adder connected to the carry input of the next most significant adder. The carry is said to ripple down the carry lines of this sort of adder, giving it the name ripple carry adder.
There are also several types of multi-bit adders. The ripple carry adder, described above, is the simplest type, as well as the slowest, since it requires changes to propagate through every full adder in the worst case. Carry lookahead adder s work by creating Propagate and Generate 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 and the Brent-Kung adder .
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.
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