A Survey of Approximate Computing:From Arithmetic Units Design to High-Level Applications  

作　　者：阙浩华 金雨 王童 刘明楷 杨兴华 乔飞 Hao-Hua Que;Yu Jin;Tong Wang;Ming-Kai Liu;Xing-Hua Yang;Fei Qiao(College of Science,Beijing Forestry University,Beijing 100091,China;Department of Electronic Engineering,Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084,China)

机构地区：[1]College of Science,Beijing Forestry University,Beijing 100091,China [2]Department of Electronic Engineering,Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084,China

出　　处：《Journal of Computer Science & Technology》2023年第2期251-272,共22页计算机科学技术学报（英文版）

基　　金：supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant No.BLX202015;Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation under Grant No.6222038;the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.92164203.

摘　　要：Realizing a high-performance and energy-efficient circuit system is one of the critical tasks for circuit designers.Conventional researchers always concentrated on the tradeoffs between the energy and the performance in circuit and system design based on accurate computing.However,as video/image processing and machine learning algorithms are widespread,the technique of approximate computing in these applications has become a hot topic.The errors caused by approximate computing could be tolerated by these applications with specific processing or algorithms,and large improvements in performance or power savings could be achieved with some acceptable loss in final output quality.This paper presents a survey of approximate computing from arithmetic units design to high-level applications,in which we try to give researchers a comprehensive and insightful understanding of approximate computing.We believe that approximate computing will play an important role in the circuit and system design in the future,especially with the rapid development of artificial intelligence algorithms and their related applications.

关 键 词：approximate computing arithmetic unit low power high performance reduced output quality 

分 类 号：TP39[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术]