DeMAS: An efficient design methodology for building approximate adders for FPGA-based systems

Bharath Srinivas Prabakaran, Semeen Rehman, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Salim Ullah, Ghazal Mazaheri, Akash Kumar, Muhammad Shafique

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The current state-of-the-art approximate adders are mostly ASIC-based, i.e., they focus solely on gate and/or transistor level approximations (e.g., through circuit simplification or truncation) to achieve area, latency, power and/or energy savings at the cost of accuracy loss. However, when these designs are synthesized for FPGA-based systems, they do not offer similar reductions in area, latency and power/energy due to the underlying architectural differences between ASICs and FPGAs. In this paper, we present a novel generic design methodology to synthesize and implement approximate adders for any FPGA-based system by considering the underlying resources and architectural differences. Using our methodology, we have designed, analyzed and presented eight different multi-bit adder architectures. Compared to the 16-bit accurate adder, our designs are successful in achieving area, latency and power-delay product gains of 50%, 38%, and 53%, respectively. We also compare our approximate adders to state-of-the-art approximate adders specialized for ASIC and FPGA fabrics and demonstrate the benefits of our approach. We will make the RTL and behavioral models of our and state-of-the-art designs open-source at https://sourceforge.net/projects/approxfpgas/ to further fuel the research and development in the FPGA community and to ensure reproducible research.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2018 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages917-920
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9783981926316
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 19 2018
Event2018 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2018 - Dresden, Germany
Duration: Mar 19 2018Mar 23 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2018 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2018
Volume2018-January

Other

Other2018 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2018
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityDresden
Period3/19/183/23/18

Keywords

  • Adders
  • Approximate Computing
  • Area
  • CAD
  • Design Flow
  • Efficiency
  • FPGA
  • LUTs
  • Optimization
  • Performance
  • Power

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software
  • Information Systems and Management

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