High-performance parallel addition using hybrid wave-pipelining

Pipelining digital systems has been shown to provide significant performance gains over non-pipelined systems and remains a standard in microprocessor design. The desire for increased performance has seen a push for deeper pipelines, as well as the introduction of pipelining schemes such as wave-pipelining and hybrid wave-pipelining. In this paper we present a hybrid wave-pipelined parallel adder that operates at 1.79 GHz, 42% performance improvement compared to that of a superpipelined adder. The simulations have been performed using a modest 0.25 mum technology. The three stage hybrid wave-pipelined parallel adder sustains a total of 8 unrelated data waves within the pipe. Another performance benefit achieved by using the hybrid wave-pipelining scheme is the lessening of delays associated with clock skew and clock distribution