Lukáš Sekanina presents The 48th meeting of the Prague computer science seminar - Evolutionary Design of Approximate Digital

On 2022-06-09 16:15:00 at KN:E-107 Zengerova posluchárna, Karlovo nám. 13, Praha 2
Evolutionary Design of Approximate Digital Circuits

Approximate computing exploits the fact that there are many error-resilient
applications (such as image processing, deep learning, and data mining) in
which
the quality of the result can be traded for energy. An open problem is how to
eff ectively approximate hardware and software, i.e., simplifying or modifying
digital circuits and programs so that the resulting application error is
acceptable for the end-user and the energy requirements are satisfi ed for
challenging deployments on resource-constrained devices. We will present a
design automation method capable of creating high-quality implementations of
approximate digital circuits. The method is based on multi-objective genetic
programming. It employs various techniques such as relaxed equivalence
checking,
optimized search strategies, and genetic operators to eliminate scalability
problems typical for design automation approaches. The method was used to
design
an open-source library of approximate adders and multipliers (EvoApproxLib) and
other resource-aware computational primitives such as image fi lters, hash
functions, and convolutional neural networks.
Responsible person: Petr Pošík