A low energy and high performance DM² Adder

A novel Dual Mode Square (DM²) adder is proposed. The DM² adder achieves low energy, high performance and small area by combining two independent techniques recently proposed by the authors: dual-mode logic (DML) and dual-mode addition (DMADD). DML is a special gate topology that allows on-the-fly adaptation of the gates to real time system requirements, and also shows a wide energy-performance tradeoff. DMADD is probability based circuit architecture with a wide energy-performance tradeoff; however its utilization in a pipelined processor requires multi-cycle operation in some cases. We show how DML circuits avoid this requirement, and thus make it possible to transparently plug-in the DM² adder and derive full benefits from the DMADD. Previous work showed that the DMADD can lead to energy savings of up to 50% at the same clock cycle, compared to conventional CMOS solutions. Simulation results in a 40 nm standard process shows that the proposed DM² approach achieves additional energy savings of 27% to 36% for 64-bit and 32-bit adders, respectively, compared to DMADD.