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doi: 10.7873/DATE.2015.1115
Designing Inexact Systems Efficiently using Elimination Heuristics
Shyamsundar Venkataraman1,a, Akash Kumar1,b, Jeremy Schlachter2,c and Christian Enz2,d
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
aakash@nus.edu.sg
bshyam@nus.edu.sg
2Integrated Circuits Laboratory, EPFL, Neuchâtel 2, Switzerland.
cjeremy.schlachter@epfl.ch
dchristian.enz@epfl.ch
ABSTRACT
There are a wide variety of applications that are
able to tolerate small errors in the values of the outputs, provided
they are within the application-specific thresholds. For such
applications, there have been many efforts to study the tradeoff
involved in the accuracy of the output and the energy/area
requirement. However, most of the efforts have been at the
level of individual components. In this article, we present a
design flow to study the inexactness at the level of system and
provide heuristics to quickly explore the design-space under given
inexactness and area/energy constraints. The approach is applied
to various digital signal processing filters and an ECG application
of QRS detection. In both cases, orders of magnitude speed-ups
are obtained in the design-flow process. Area savings of 21.61%
and power savings of 22.79% were observed for a low-pass filter
having a relative error of just 8E-5%.
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