Energy-efficiency is a critical concern for many systems, ranging from Internet of things objects and mobile devices to high-performance computers. Moreover, after 40 years of prosperity, Moore's law is starting to show its economic and technical limits. Noticing that many circuits are over-engineered and that many applications are error-resilient or require less precision than offered by the existing hardware, approximate computing has emerged as a potential solution to pursue improvements of digital circuits. In this regard, a technique to systematically tradeoff accuracy in exchange for area, power, and delay savings in digital circuits is proposed: gate-level pruning (GLP). A CAD tool is build and integrated into a standard digital flow to offer a wide range of cost-accuracy tradeoffs for any conventional design. The methodology is first demonstrated on adders, achieving up to 78% energy-delay-area reduction for 10% mean relative error. It is then detailed how this methodology can be applied on a more complex system composed of a multitude of arithmetic blocks and memory: the discrete cosine transform (DCT), which is a key building block for image and video processing applications. Even though arithmetic circuits represent less than 4% of the entire DCT area, it is shown that the GLP technique can lead to 21% energy-delay-area savings over the entire system for a reasonable image quality loss of 24 dB. This significant saving is achieved thanks to the pruned arithmetic circuits, which sets some nodes at constant values, enabling the synthesis tool to further simplify the circuit and memory.

This paper introduces an approximate adder architecture based on a digital quasi-feedback technique called Carry Cut-Back in which high-significance stages can cut the carry propagation chain at lower-significance positions. This lightweight approach prevents activation of the critical path, improving energy efficiency while guaranteeing low worst-case relative error. It offers a degree of freedom which allows to dissociate precision and dynamic range in fixed-point implementation. A design methodology is presented along with results and a comparative study. For a worst-case accuracy of 98%, energy savings up to 44% and power-delay-area reductions up to 62% are demonstrated compared to low-power conventional designs.

Inexact circuits and approximate computing have been gaining a lot of interest in order to improve performances and energy efficiency beyond the boundaries of conventional digital circuits. Image and video processing is one of the best candidate for applying such techniques. As one of the key building blocks, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) accelerators are investigated using pruned arithmetic circuits. A design methodology is presented in order to optimize both image quality and circuit performances. This work demonstrates that with such technique, savings are possible not only on arithmetic units, but in the entire accelerator hardware. Simulations show up to 12 % area and 10 % power savings with less than 20 dB PSNR degradation compared to the conventional DCT design.

Inexact and approximate circuit design is a promising approach to improve performance and energy efficiency in technology-scaled and low-power digital systems. Such strategy is suitable for error-tolerant applications involving perceptive or statistical outputs. This paper presents a novel architecture of an Inexact Speculative Adder with optimized hardware efficiency and advanced compensation technique with either error correction or error reduction. This general topology of speculative adders improves performance and enables precise accuracy control. A brief design methodology and comparative study of this speculative adder are also presented herein, demonstrating power savings up to 26 % and energy-delay-area reductions up to 60% at equivalent accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.

Inexact or approximate circuits show great ability to reduce power consumption at the cost of occasional errors in comparison to their conventional counterparts. Even though the benefits of such circuits have been proven for many applications, they are not wide spread owing to the absence of a clear design methodology and the required CAD tools. In this regard, this paper presents a methodology to automatically generate inexact circuits starting from a conventional design by adding only one small step in the digital design flow. Further, this paper also demonstrates that achieving pruning at gate-level can lead to substantial savings in terms of power consumption, critical path delay and silicon area. An order of magnitude area and power savings is demonstrated for a 64-bit gate level pruned high-speed adder for a 10% relative error magnitude.