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Kogge–Stone adder

arithmetic logic circuit

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ6425788 ↗
Source-derived summary

In computing, the Kogge–Stone adder (KSA or KS) is a parallel prefix form of carry-lookahead adder. Other parallel prefix adders (PPA) include the Sklansky adder (SA), Brent–Kung adder (BKA), the Han–Carlson adder (HCA), the fastest known variation, the Lynch–Swartzlander spanning tree adder (STA), Knowles adder (KNA) and Beaumont-Smith adder (BSA) (like Sklansky adder (SA), radix-4).

The Kogge–Stone adder takes more area to implement than the Brent–Kung adder but has a lower fan-out at each stage, which increases performance for typical CMOS process nodes. However, wiring congestion is often a problem for Kogge–Stone adders. The Lynch–Swartzlander design is smaller, has lower fan-out, and does not suffer from wiring congestion; however to be used the process node must support Manchester carry chain implementations. The general problem of optimizing parallel prefix adders is identical to the variable block size, multi level, carry-skip adder optimization problem, a solution of which is found in Thomas Lynch's thesis of 1996.

Design

Like all carry-lookahead adders, the Kogge-Stone adder internally tracks "generate" and "propagate" bits for spans of bits. We start with 1-bit spans, where a single column in the addition generates a carry bit if both inputs are 1 (logical AND), and propagates a carry bit if exactly one input is 1 (logical XOR). Then adjacent spans are merged together to produce generate and propagate bits for wider spans.

Merging continues until generate bits are known for all spans ending at the least significant bit, at which point these may be used as the carry inputs to compute all the sum bits in parallel.

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The public source identifies “Kogge–Stone adder” as arithmetic logic circuit. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kogge, Stone and adder.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1996—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Kogge, Stone and adder providing the first useful test.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kogge–Stone adder” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.