Adders are one of the most widely digital components in the digital integrated circuit design and are the necessary part of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications. With the advances in technology, researchers have tried and are trying to design adders which offer either high speed, low power consumption, less area or the combination of them. In this paper, the design of various adders such as ripple carry adder, carry skip adder, carry increment adder, carry look ahead adder, carry save adder, carry select adder, carry bypass adder are discussed and are compared on the basis of their performance parameters such as area, delay and power distribution.