Creating optimized hardware for error tolerant applications presents significant challenges as well as opportunities. Many algorithms in computer graphics & vision are error tolerant, as their application level correctness ultimately rests on human perception. This error tolerance can be exploited in reducing hardware implementation cost. The challenge is how to explore the space of application level correct designs to determine the optimized hardware architecture. This paper puts forward an approach to automatically explore the space which maximally exploits the acceptable error to minimize hardware cost for a particular graphics algorithm - Level-Of-Detail. Results, so far, have shown a 26% hardware area improvement.

The physical layer of most wireless protocols is traditionally implemented in custom hardware to satisfy the heavy computational requirements while keeping power consumption to a minimum. These implementations are time consuming to design and difficult to verify. A programmable hardware platform capable of supporting software implementations of the physical layer, or software defined radio, has a number of advantages. These include support for multiple protocols, faster time-to-market, higher chip volumes, and support for late implementation changes. The challenge is to achieve this without sacrificing power. In this paper, we present a design study for a fully programmable architecture, SODA, that supports software defined radio a high-end signal processing application. Our design achieves high performance, energy efficiency, and programmability through a combination of features that include single-instruction multiple- data (SIMD) parallelism, and hardware optimized for 16bit computations. The basic processing element is an asymmetric processor consisting of a scalar and SIMD pipeline, and a set of distributed scratchpad memories that are fully managed in software. Results show that a four processor design is capable of meeting the throughput requirements of theW-CDMA and 802.11a protocols, while operating within the strict power constraints of a mobile terminal.