Area and delay efficient GDI based accuracy configurable adder design

Abstract

Adders are one of the basic fundamental critical arithmetic circuits in a system and their performances affect the overall performance of the system. Traditional n-bit adders provide precise results, whereas the lower bound of their critical path delay of n bit adder is Ὠ(log n). To achieve a minimum critical path delay lower than Ὠ(log n), many inaccurate adders have been proposed. These inaccurate adders decrease the overall critical path delay and improve the speed of computation by sacrificing the accuracy or predicting the computation results. In this work, a fast reconfigurable approximate ripple carry adder has been proposed using GDI (Gate Diffusion Logic) passing cell. Here, GDI cell acts as a reconfigurable cell to be either connected with the previous carry value or approximated value in an adder chain. This adder has greater advantage and it can be configured as an accurate or inaccurate adder by selecting working mode in GDI cell. The implementation results show that, in the approximate working mode, the proposed 64-bit adder provides up to 23%, 34% and 95% reductions in area, power and delay, respectively compared to those of the existing adder.