Aaron's Notes

Half and Full Adders

The following is a classic half adder circuit, built with XOR and NAND gates:

Half adder

The XOR gate decides the parity of the output bit S, and the two NAND gates act as an AND gate for the inputs, deciding whether the carry bit should be set.

Here’s a full adder, which also deals with an incoming carry bit:

Full adder

The Wikipedia article discusses a number of possibilities for deciding on the carry bit. This one has the virtue of using only NAND gates.