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ADAC: Automated Design of Approximate Circuits

2018; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-96145-3_35

1611-3349

Milan Češka, Jiří Matyáš, Vojtěch Mrázek, Lukáš Sekanina, Zdeněk Vašíček, Tomáš Vojnar,

Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuit Design

Approximate circuits with relaxed requirements on functional correctness play an important role in the development of resource-efficient computer systems. Designing approximate circuits is a very complex and time-demanding process trying to find optimal trade-offs between the approximation error and resource savings. In this paper, we present ADAC—a novel framework for automated design of approximate arithmetic circuits. ADAC integrates in a unique way efficient simulation and formal methods for approximate equivalence checking into a search-based circuit optimisation. To make ADAC easily accessible, it is implemented as a module of the ABC tool: a state-of-the-art system for circuit synthesis and verification. Within several hours, ADAC is able to construct high-quality Pareto sets of complex circuits (including even 32-bit multipliers), providing useful trade-offs between the resource consumption and the error that is formally guaranteed. This demonstrates outstanding performance and scalability compared with other existing approaches.