Accurate Reliability Analysis Methods for Approximate Computing Circuits  

作　　者：Zhen Wang Guofa Zhang Jing Ye Jianhui Jiang Fengyong Li Yong Wang 

机构地区：[1]School of the Computer Science and Technology,Shanghai University of Electric Power,Shanghai 200090,China [2]Institute of Computing Technology,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100190,China [3]School of Software Engineering,Tongji University,Shanghai 200092,China

出　　处：《Tsinghua Science and Technology》2022年第4期729-740,共12页清华大学学报（自然科学版（英文版）

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.61432017 and 61772327);the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai(Nos.20ZR1455900 and 20ZR1421600);the Qi'anxin National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Collaborative Security Technology Open Project(No.QAX-201803);State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture,Institute of Computing Technology,Chinese Academy of Sciences(No.CARCHA202005)。

摘　　要：In recent years,Approximate Computing Circuits(ACCs)have been widely used in applications with intrinsic tolerance to errors.With the increased availability of approximate computing circuit approaches,reliability analysis methods for assessing their fault vulnerability have become highly necessary.In this study,two accurate reliability evaluation methods for approximate computing circuits are proposed.The reliability of approximate computing circuits is calculated on the basis of the iterative Probabilistic Transfer Matrix(PTM)model.During the calculation,the correlation coefficients are derived and combined to deal with the correlation problem caused by fanout reconvergence.The accuracy and scalability of the two methods are verified using three sets of approximate computing circuit instances and more circuits in Evo Approx8 b,which is an approximate computing circuit open source library.Experimental results show that relative to the Monte Carlo simulation,the two methods achieve average error rates of 0.46%and 1.29%and time overheads of 0.002%and 0.1%.Different from the existing approaches to reliability estimation for approximate computing circuits based on the original PTM model,the proposed methods reduce the space overheads by nearly 50%and achieve time overheads of 1.78%and 2.19%.

关 键 词：Approximate Computing Circuit(ACC) correlation coefficient iterative Probabilistic Transfer Matrix(PTM) RELIABILITY 

分 类 号：TN701[电子电信—电路与系统] TP38[自动化与计算机技术—计算机系统结构]