Abstract. Since adiabatic logic uses a supply that incorporates both supply voltage and clock signal in one line, adiabatic logic systems have a built-in micro-pipelined architecture. Considering this fact, different design constraints have to be observed compared to static CMOS designs. Complex arithmetic building blocks, like multipliers, mainly consist of adders. Therefore, a comparison of adder structures is performed. Based on these results, multipliers and complex systems can be built. A Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) is taken as example for an arithmetic system. Comparing an adiabatic logic implementation of a DCT to its static CMOS counterpart, a significant saving factor of more than 10 can be achieved with the adiabatic system.