Power and area-optimised Carry-Select Adder architecture for standard cell-based design

Abstract

A Carry-Select Adder (CSA) is one of the most suitable adders for high-speed applications, but the power and area penalties are greater, because it requires a double Ripple-Carry Adder (RCA) structure corresponding to carry inputs 0 and 1. Current low-power and low-area techniques are not suitable for a standard cell-based design which is one of the widely adopted design methodologies. Our work proposes two simple optimised architectures suitable for standard cell-based designs. A simple decision logic that replaces the RCA for Carry input 1 in a conventional CSA is proposed. One of the proposed architectures reduces power and area significantly with a small delay penalty compared to the existing techniques. Another proposed architecture improves the speed of operation and reduces the power and area considerably. The first one is more suitable for high-speed arithmetic in battery-operated applications where there is a trade-off between speed and power, while the other one is suitable for high-performance applications which also require area and power optimisation. The proposed architectures were implemented in TSMC 0.18um CMOS technology, and compared with conventional Square Root Carry-Select Adders and an existing standard cell-based design.