Approximate Arithmetic Circuit Architectures for FPGA-based Systems

This book presents various novel architectures for FPGA-optimized accurate and approximate operators, their detailed accuracy and performance analysis, various techniques to model the behavior of approximate operators, and thorough application-level analysis to evaluate the impact of approximations on the final output quality and performance metrics. As multiplication is one of the most commonly used and computationally expensive operations in various error-resilient applications such as digital signal and image processing and machine learning algorithms, this book particularly focuses on this operation. The book starts by elaborating on the various sources of error resilience and opportunities available for approximations on various layers of the computation stack. It then provides a detailed description of the state-of-the-art approximate computing-related works and highlights their limitations.

Introduction.- Preliminaries.- Accurate Multipliers.- Approximate Multipliers.- Designing Application-specific Approximate Operators.- A Framework for Cross-layer Approximations.- Conclusions.

Salim Ullah received the Ph.D. degree with Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science, from Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Dresden, Germany, in 2021. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research associate at the Chair of Processor Design, TUD, Germany. His current research interests include the design of approximate arithmetic units, approximate caches, reconfigurable computing, and hardware accelerators of AI and machine learning algorithms.