FPGA-FAQ    0034

Can I build adders faster than the adders with Carry chains





Vendor Xilinx/Altera
FAQ Entry Author Ray Andraka
FAQ Entry Editor Philip Freidin
FAQ Entry Date 11/30/2002

Q. Can I build adders faster than the adders with Carry chains

A. (Extracted from one of Ray's Articles, 11/19/2002

The reason for doing a carry save adder is to defer the add carry to the last
adder in the tree. Normally this is done in order to permit construction of
just one fast adder. The speed of an adder tree is limited by the speed of
the propagation through any path in the tree, and the worst case paths are
from the lsb of an input to the msb of the output. In other technologies, a
ripple carry adder is slower than fancier carry look-ahead schemes, but the
fancy schemes take up considerably more logic. By deferring the carry to the
last stage, one only has to build one of these expensive adders. The rest of
the adders have the same cost as the ripple carry adder but without the ripple
propagation. So by doing this, you speed up the adder tree as if all the
adders were the more expensive fast adders.

Now enter the FPGA, with its dedicated adder carry chains (these actually do
have some carry look-ahead built in, but it is hidden from the user). In the
case of the FPGA it is very hard, impossible in many cases, to build an adder
that is faster than the built in adder function because the dedicated
resources are so much faster than the general purpose routing. Since that
ripple adder is the fastest one can build in the fpga, there is no penalty (in
fact there is an advantage) to using them through out the adder tree rather
than only at the final add. The advantage is that by doing this, all the
carry logic is put on the dedicated resources, so you essentially get the
carry half of all the 3:2 adders for free. If you decided to build an adder
without using the chains (including the Carry Save type), you need two LUTs
per full adder instead of the one because you can't take advantage of the
dedicated carry logic, so not only do you get no speed advantage in an FPGA by
using a CSA tree, but you also get soaked for twice the resources, and in fact
you get a speed degradation due to the irregular routing.


The bottom line is that carry save adder trees DO NOT MAKE SENSE for FPGAs
that have dedicated adder resources.

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