19 July 2020

Advantages and disadvantages of half adder

Half adder is a combinational arithmetic circuit that adds two numbers and it produces a sum bits and carries bits as the output form. Now here this article gives information about the advantages and disadvantages of half adders to better understand this topic. 

Advantages of Half adder:

  • Simple design, the basic building block to understanding 1-bit addition.
  • Just with an inverter, it can be converted to the half subtractor.

Disadvantages of half adder:

  • Half adders have no scope of adding the carry bit resulting from the addition of previous bits.
  • The real-time scenarios involve adding the multiple numbers of bits which cannot be accomplished using half adder.
  • It is not suitable for cascading for multi-bit additions.
  • To get rid of this problem, a full adder is required which adds three 1 bit.
  • It does not incorporate the previous carry for addition.