The authors present a review of the basic types of adder implementation, which provides various tradeoffs in speed, configuration, and area.

The paper begins with an introduction to binary number systems, and to addition and subtraction of binary numbers. Some common adder implementations, such as ripple carry adder, carry skip adder, carry select adder, and carry look-ahead adder, are presented in later sections. Typically, these implementations are presented at the logic gate level; transistor level implementations are provided as necessary to emphasize some speedup issues.

One significant drawback of the paper is the absence of a summarized comparison of the different adder implementations. Another flaw is the fact that the power dissipation within these implementations is not covered. However, a significant number of references are provided for the interested reader.