EvoApprox8b: Library of Approximate Adders and Multipliers for Circuit Design and Benchmarking of Approximation Methods

Vojtech Mrazeka, Radek Hrbacekb, Zdenek Vasicekc and Lukas Sekaninad
Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, IT4Innovations Centre of Excellence, Brno, Czech Republic.
aimrazek@fit.vutbr.cz
bihrbacek@fit.vutbr.cz
cvasicek@fit.vutbr.cz
dsekanina@fit.vutbr.cz

ABSTRACT


Approximate circuits and approximate circuit design methodologies attracted a significant attention of researchers as well as industry in recent years. In order to accelerate the approximate circuit and system design process and to support a fair benchmarking of circuit approximation methods, we propose a library of approximate adders and multipliers called EvoApprox8b. This library contains 430 nondominated 8-bit approximate adders created from 13 conventional adders and 471 non-dominated 8-bit approximate multipliers created from 6 conventional multipliers. These implementations were evolved by a multi-objective Cartesian genetic programming. The EvoApprox8b library provides Verilog, Matlab and C models of all approximate circuits. In addition to standard circuit parameters, the error is given for seven different error metrics. The EvoApprox8b library is available at: www.fit.vutbr.cz/research/groups/ehw/approxlib



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