A Survey of Reliability Issues Related to Approximate Circuits  

作　　者：王真 徐荣臣 陈嘉诚 肖杰 Zhen Wang;Rong-Chen Xu;Jia-Cheng Chen;Jie Xiao(College of Computer Science and Technology,Shanghai University of Electric Power,Shanghai 200090,China;College of Computer Science and Technology,Zhejiang University of Technology,Hangzhou 310000,China)

机构地区：[1]College of Computer Science and Technology,Shanghai University of Electric Power,Shanghai 200090,China [2]College of Computer Science and Technology,Zhejiang University of Technology,Hangzhou 310000,China

出　　处：《Journal of Computer Science & Technology》2023年第2期273-288,共16页计算机科学技术学报（英文版）

基　　金：supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai under Grant No.20ZR1455900;the State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture(Institute of Computing Technology,Chinese Academy of Sciences)under Grant No.CARCHA202005.

摘　　要：As one of the most promising paradigms of integrated circuit design,the approximate circuit has aroused widespread concern in the scientific community.It takes advantage of the inherent error tolerance of some applications and relaxes the accuracy for reductions in area and power consumption.This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of reliability issues related to approximate circuits,which covers three concerns:error characteristic analysis,reliability and test,and reliable design involving approximate circuits.The error characteristic analysis is used to compare the outputs of the approximate circuit with those of its precise counterpart,which can help to find the most appropriate approximate design for a specific application in the large design space.With the approximate design getting close to physical realization,manufacturing defects and operational faults are inevitable;therefore,the reliability prediction and vulnerability test become increasingly important.However,the research on approximate circuit reliability and test is insufficient and needs more attention.Furtherly,although there is some existing work combining the approximate design with fault tolerant techniques,the reliability-enhancement approaches for approximate circuits are lacking.

关 键 词：approximate circuit error metric fault tolerance test reliability 

分 类 号：O17[理学—数学]