Chapter 5: Arithmetic Circuits

This chapter studies an important class of combinational circuits, the arithmetic circuits. For these type of circuits, the set of inputs (operands) and outputs (result) bits uses a numeric encoding. As with nearly all existing systems, this text assumes that the operands and result use the natural binary code notation, which we studied in Section 1.1, or one of its variations to enable the representation of negative values, which we will examine in this chapter. Thus, each combination of input bits is interpreted as a base-2 numeric value, and the output represents the result of a given arithmetic operation on the numeric input values.