A Novel Hybrid Parallel-Prefix Adder Architecture With Efficient Timing-Area Characteristic

Two-operand binary addition is the most widely used arithmetic operation in modern datapath designs. To improve the efficiency of this operation, it is desirable to use an adder with good performance and area tradeoff characteristics. This paper presents an efficient carry-lookahead adder architecture based on the parallel-prefix computation graph. In our proposed method, we define the notion of triple-carry-operator, which computes the generate and propagate signals for a merged block which combines three adjacent blocks. We use this in conjunction with the classic approach of the carry-operator to compute the generate and propagate signals for a merged block combining two adjacent blocks. The timing-driven nature of the proposed design reduces the depth of the adder. In addition, we use a ripple-carry type of structure in the nontiming critical portion of the parallel-prefix computation network. These techniques help produce a good timing-area tradeoff characteristic. The experimental results indicate that our proposed adder is significantly faster than the popular Brent-Kung adder with some area overhead. On the adder hand, the proposed adder also shows marginally faster performance than the fast Kogge-Stone adder with significant area savings.