NDLI: ABACUS: A technique for automated behavioral synthesis of approximate computing circuits

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Nepal, K. Yueting Li Bahar, R.I. Reda, S.
Copyright Year	2014
Description	Author affiliation: Sch. of Eng., Brown Univ., Providence, RI, USA (Nepal, K.; Yueting Li; Bahar, R.I.; Reda, S.)
Abstract	Many classes of applications, especially in the domains of signal and image processing, computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning, are inherently tolerant to inaccuracies in their underlying computations. This tolerance can be exploited to design approximate circuits that perform within acceptable accuracies but have much lower power consumption and smaller area footprints (and often better run times) than their exact counterparts. In this paper, we propose a new class of automated synthesis methods for generating approximate circuits directly from behavioral-level descriptions. In contrast to previous methods that operate at the Boolean level or use custom modifications, our automated behavioral synthesis method enables a wider range of possible approximations and can operate on arbitrary designs. Our method first creates an abstract synthesis tree (AST) from the input behavioral description, and then applies variant operators to the AST using an iterative stochastic greedy approach to identify the optimal inexact designs in an efficient way. Our method is able to identify the optimal designs that represent the Pareto frontier trade-off between accuracy and power consumption. Our methodology is developed into a tool we call ABACUS, which we integrate with a standard ASIC experimental flow based on industrial tools. We validate our methods on three realistic Verilog-based benchmarks from three different domains - signal processing, computer vision and machine learning. Our tool automatically discovers optimal designs, providing area and power savings of up to 50% while maintaining good accuracy.
Starting Page	1
Ending Page	6
File Size	578209
Page Count	6
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9783981537024
DOI	10.7873/DATE.2014.374
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2014-03-24
Publisher Place	Germany
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	European Design Automation Association (EDAA)
Subject Keyword	Approximation methods Accuracy Standards Finite impulse response filters Hardware design languages Approximation algorithms Algorithm design and analysis
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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