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Energy-efficiency is a critical concern for many computing systems. With Moore's law showing its limits, new hardware design and programming techniques emerge to pursue energy scaling. Among these, approximate computing is certainly the most popular in current works. It has been shown that reducing precision using software techniques can show significant energy savings on commercially available processors...
Energy-efficiency is a critical concern for many systems, ranging from Internet of things objects and mobile devices to high-performance computers. Moreover, after 40 years of prosperity, Moore’s law is starting to show its economic and technical limits. Noticing that many circuits are over-engineered and that many applications are error-resilient or require less precision than offered by the existing...
The floating-point unit is one of the most common building block in any computing system and is used for a huge number of applications. By combining two state-of-the-art techniques of imprecise hardware, namely Gate-Level Pruning and Inexact Speculative Adder, and by introducing a novel Inexact Speculative Multiplier architecture, three different approximate FPUs and one reference IEEE-754 compliant...
Energy and power consumption are major limitations to continued scaling of computing systems. Inexactness where the quality of the solution can be traded for energy savings has been proposed as a counterintuitive approach to overcoming those limitation. However, in the past, inexactness has been necessitated the need for highly customized or specialized hardware. In order to move away from customization,...
Inexact circuits and approximate computing have been gaining a lot of interest in order to improve performances and energy efficiency beyond the boundaries of conventional digital circuits. Image and video processing is one of the best candidate for applying such techniques. As one of the key building blocks, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) accelerators are investigated using pruned arithmetic circuits...
This paper introduces an approximate adder architecture based on a digital quasi-feedback technique called Carry CutBack in which high-significance stages can cut the carry propagation chain at lower-significance positions. This lightweight approach prevents activation of the critical path, improving energy efficiency while guaranteeing low worst-case relative error. It offers a degree of freedom...
While sub/near-threshold design offers the minimal power and energy consumption, such approach strongly deteriorates circuit performances and robustness against PVT (process/voltage/temperature) variations, leading to gigantic speed penalties and large silicon areas. Inexact and approximate circuit design can address these issues by trading calculation accuracy for better silicon area, circuit speed...
Inexact and approximate circuit design is a promising approach to improve performance and energy efficiency in technology-scaled and low-power digital systems. Such strategy is suitable for error tolerant applications involving perceptive or statistical outputs. This paper reviews two established techniques applicable to arithmetic units: circuit pruning and carry speculation. A critical comparative...
Inexact or approximate circuits show great ability to reduce power consumption at the cost of occasional errors in comparison to their conventional counterparts. Even though the benefits of such circuits have been proven for many applications, they are not wide spread owing to the absence of a clear design methodology and the required CAD tools. In this regard, this paper presents a methodology to...
Inexact and approximate circuit design is a promising approach to improve performance and energy efficiency in technology-scaled and low-power digital systems. Such strategy is suitable for error-tolerant applications involving perceptive or statistical outputs. This paper presents a novel architecture of an Inexact Speculative Adder with optimized hardware efficiency and advanced compensation technique...
In this paper, we demonstrate that disproportionate gains are possible through a simple devise for injecting inexactness or approximation into the hardware architecture of a computing system with a general purpose template including a complete memory hierarchy. The focus of the study is on energy savings possible through this approach in the context of large and challenging applications. We choose...
There are a wide variety of applications that are able to tolerate small errors in the values of the outputs, provided they are within the application-specific thresholds. For such applications, there have been many efforts to study the tradeoff involved in the accuracy of the output and the energy/area requirement. However, most of the efforts have been at the level of individual components. In this...
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