A fast VLSI adder architecture

An architecture for performing fixed-point, high-speed, two's-complement, bit-parallel addition by using the carry-free property of redundant arithmetic and a fast parallel redundant-to-binary conversion scheme is presented. The internal numbers are represented in radix-2 redundant digit form, and the inputs and the output of the adder are represented in two's-complement binary form. The adder operands are added first in a radix-2 redundant adder to produce the result in radix-2 digit (-1, 0, 1) form. This result is converted to two's-complement binary form using the parallel conversion scheme. The high-speed conversion for long words is achieved through the use of a novel sign-select operation. The proposed adder, referred to as the sign-select conversion adder, is faster than all previous high-speed two's-complement binary adders for large word lengths. The implementation is highly regular with repeated modules and is very well suited for VLSI implementation