Discrete Steps towards Approximate Computing

International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), pp. 1–6

Abstract

As long as a computational precision above 8 bits is preferred, digital design generally outperforms analog one incurring less hardware cost. This motivates our recent studies on digital approximate computing as presented in this paper. Rather than using fixed-point numbers, discrete steps of approximation using floating-point number representations such as BFloat16 and posit formats are explored particularly. Time-domain computing is addressed as well which starts in the digital domain with discrete delay values and moves towards the analog domain under increased delay uncertainties when pushed for energy efficiency by voltage scaling. The proposed approximate arithmetic and nonlinear activation functions are further evaluated in various artificial neural networks achieving competitive Quality-of-Service compared to the state-of-the-art with full-precision computing.

Authors 9

1. Michael Gansen Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University,Germany

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

2. Jie Lou Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University,Germany

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

3. Florian Freye Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University,Germany

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

4. Tobias Gemmeke Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University,Germany

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

5. Farhad Merchant Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   ICE, RWTH Aachen University,Germany

   ICE, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

6. Albert Zeyer Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   HLTPR, RWTH Aachen University, and AppTek GmbH,Aachen,Germany

   HLTPR, RWTH Aachen University, and AppTek GmbH, Aachen, Germany

7. Mohammad Zeineldeen Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   HLTPR, RWTH Aachen University, and AppTek GmbH,Aachen,Germany

   HLTPR, RWTH Aachen University, and AppTek GmbH, Aachen, Germany

8. Ralf Schlüter Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   HLTPR, RWTH Aachen University, and AppTek GmbH,Aachen,Germany

   HLTPR, RWTH Aachen University, and AppTek GmbH, Aachen, Germany

9. Xin Fan Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University,Germany

   IDS, RWTH Aachen University, Germany