Aaron's Notes

Simplified Adders

In the previous adders post the circuits used NAND and XOR gates. But you can do better in terms of number of gates (and therefore amount of soldering) by using AND and XOR. The half adder has only two gates instead of three:

Half adder with AND gate

The full adder has the same number of gates as before, but they’ve switched from NAND to AND in order to keep using only two types of gates throughout:

Full adder with AND gate