AxMAP: Making Approximate Adders Aware of Input Patterns

Making approximate computing specific to user requirements is crucial to system performance, energy-efficiency, and reliability. However, developing hardware for such optimization becomes a significant challenge due to the high cost of examining all potential choices while exploring a large design space. One determinant aspect of exploring a design space is the efficiency of evaluating error metrics, such as the Mean Error Distance (MED) and the Error Probability (EP), for each possible choice within the search space. Since computing these error-metrics is quite time-consuming, efficient calculation approaches are essential. This article proposes a novel formal approach to accurately compute the EP and MED of approximate adders for any input pattern at a linear time and space complexity. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can accurately compute the error-metrics of large approximate adders at a 150 times faster speed compared to the Monte Carlo sampling methods. We then develop AxMAP, a design tool based on the proposed error-metrics computation that generates energy-efficient approximate adders for any given input pattern. When applied to image processing applications, AxMAP produces more than 150 different designs for adders that achieve superior performance and energy-efficiency compared to the existing state-of-the-art approximate adders.