A low-power carry skip adder with fast saturation

Abstract

We present the design of a carry skip adder that achieves low power dissipation and high-performance operation. The carry skip adder's delay and power dissipation are reduced by dividing the adder into variable-sized blocks that balance the delay of inputs to the carry chain. This grouping reduces active power by minimizing extraneous glitches and transitions. Each block also uses highly optimized complementing carry look-ahead logic to reduce delay. Compared to previous designs, the adder architecture decreases power consumption by reducing the number of transistors, logic levels, and glitches. A 32-bit carry skip adder design that uses our approach has been implemented in 130 nm CMOS technology. At 1.2 V and 25 C, the 32-bit adder has a critical path delay of 921 ps and average power dissipation normalized to 600 MHz operation of 0.786 mW. We also present a technique to quickly perform saturating addition, which is useful in a variety of digital signal processing and multimedia applications. Our technique for fast saturation is based on techniques for carry select addition and works particularly well when the input and output operands can have different formats. A 40-bit carry skip adder that uses our technique for fast saturation has critical path delays of 1149 ps in 130 nm technology at 1.2 V and 25 C and 560 ps in 90nm technology at 1.0 V and 25 C. The 40-bit adder's average power dissipation normalized to 600 MHz operation is 0.928 mW in 130 nm technology and 0.335 mW in 90 nm technology.