HICPA: A hybrid low power adder for high-performance processors

In this work we introduce a hybrid CLA-Ripple Power-aware adder (or simply HICPA) for high performance processors. HICPA is a multi-component adder that saves power by avoiding aggressive usage of the Carry Look-Ahead adder for add operations using small operands. Instead, for small size operands, HICPA uses a small and power efficient Ripple Adder. We evaluate HICPA using a subset of SPEC'2K benchmarks and show that, after taking into account the associated power overhead, it is possible to reduce average ALU power dissipation by 15.7% without compromising performance.