An Optimization Technique for PMF Estimation in Approximate Circuits  

作　　者：窦昱钦 王成华 Yu-Qin Dou;Cheng-Hua Wang(College of Electronic and Information Engineering,Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,Nanjing 211106 China)

机构地区：[1]College of Electronic and Information Engineering,Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,Nanjing 211106 China

出　　处：《Journal of Computer Science & Technology》2023年第2期289-297,共9页计算机科学技术学报（英文版）

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.62022041;the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant No.NP2022103.

摘　　要：As an emerging computing technology,approximate computing enables computing systems to utilize hardware resources efficiently.Recently,approximate arithmetic units have received extensive attention and have been employed as hardware modules to build approximate circuit systems,such as approximate accelerators.In order to make the approximate circuit system meet the application requirements,it is imperative to quickly estimate the error quality caused by the approximate unit,especially in the high-level synthesis of the approximate circuit.However,there are few studies in the literature on how to efficiently evaluate the errors in the approximate circuit system.Hence,this paper focuses on error evaluation techniques for circuit systems consisting of approximate adders and approximate multipliers,which are the key hardware components in fault-tolerant applications.In this paper,the characteristics of probability mass function(PMF)based estimation are analyzed initially,and then an optimization technique for PMF-based estimation is proposed with consideration of these features.Finally,experiments prove that the optimization technology can reduce the time required for PMF-based estimation and improve the estimation quality.

关 键 词：approximate circuit error quality estimate probability mass function(PMF)estimation architecture level 

分 类 号：O17[理学—数学]