Automated Generation and Evaluation of Application-Oriented Approximate Arithmetic Circuits

Approximate arithmetic circuits (AACs) are increasingly investigated to design high-performance and energy-efficient hardware for error-tolerant applications. However, it is of great difficulty and time-consuming to manually design and select AACs for complex applications. This chapter reviews the automated methodologies for quickly generating AACs and estimating their quality of results (QoRs) in applications. Specifically, the methodologies automatically generating AACs, generally under particular statistical error constraints, are introduced and compared. Also, the acceleration approaches for evaluating the QoRs of AAC-based applications are discussed. Moreover, the QoR recovery techniques for AAC-based applications are introduced. Finally, we prospect the potential ways to facilitate the automated generation of AACs for applications with specific accuracy and hardware requirements.