Fault Tolerant Reversible Logic Synthesis: Carry Look-Ahead and Carry-Skip Adders

Irreversible logic circuits dissipate heat for every bit of information that is lost. Information is lost when the input vector cannot be recovered from its corresponding output vector. Reversible logic circuit naturally takes care of heating because it implements only the functions that have one-to-one mapping between its input and output vectors. Therefore reversible logic design becomes one of the promising research directions in low power dissipating circuit design in the past few years and has found its application in low power CMOS design, digital signal processing and nanotechnology. This paper presents the efficient approaches for designing reversible fast adders that implement carry look-ahead and carry-skip logic. The proposed 16-bit high speed reversible adder will include IG gates for the realization of its basic building block. The IG gate is universal in the sense that it can be used to synthesize any arbitrary Boolean-functions. The IG gate is parity preserving, that is, the parity of the inputs matches the parity of the outputs. It allows any fault that affects no more than a single signal readily detectable at the circuit's primary outputs. Therefore, the proposed high speed adders will have the inherent opportunity of detecting errors in its output side. It has also been demonstrated that the proposed design offers less hardware complexity and is efficient in terms of gate count, garbage outputs and constant inputs than the existing counterparts.