This is about a digital circuit. For an electronic circuit that handles analog signals see Electronic mixer.

In electronics, an adder or summer is a digital circuit that performs addition of numbers. In many computers and other kinds of processors, adders are used not only in the arithmetic logic unit(s), but also in other parts of the processor, where they are used to calculate addresses, table indices, and similar.

Although adders can be constructed for many numerical representations, such as binary-coded decimal or excess-3, the most common adders operate on binary numbers. In cases where two's complement or ones' complement is being used to represent negative numbers, it is trivial to modify an adder into an adder–subtractor. Other signed number representations require a more complex adder.

The half adder adds two one-bit binary numbers A and B. It has two outputs, S and C (the value theoretically carried on to the next addition); the final sum is 2C + S. The simplest half-adder design, pictured on the right, incorporates an XOR gate for S and an AND gate for C. With the addition of an OR gate to combine their carry outputs, two half adders can be combined to make a full adder.

Electronics is the branch of physics, engineering and technology dealing with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies. The nonlinear behaviour of active components and their ability to control electron flows makes amplification of weak signals possible and is usually applied to information and signal processing. Similarly, the ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible. Interconnection technologies such as circuit boards, electronics packaging technology, and other varied forms of communication infrastructure complete circuit functionality and transform the mixed components into a working system.

Electronics is distinct from electrical and electro-mechanical science and technology, which deals with the generation, distribution, switching, storage and conversion of electrical energy to and from other energy forms using wires, motors, generators, batteries, switches, relays, transformers, resistors and other passive components. This distinction started around 1906 with the invention by Lee De Forest of the triode, which made electrical amplification of weak radio signals and audio signals possible with a non-mechanical device. Until 1950 this field was called "radio technology" because its principal application was the design and theory of radio transmitters, receivers and vacuum tubes.