HPR-Mul: An Area and Energy-Efficient High-Precision Redundancy Multiplier by Approximate Computing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Vafaei, Jafar, Akbari, Omid
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Vafaei, Jafar
Akbari, Omid
author_facet Vafaei, Jafar
Akbari, Omid
contents For critical applications that require a higher level of reliability, the Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) scheme is usually employed to implement fault-tolerant arithmetic units. However, this method imposes a significant area and power/energy overhead. Also, the majority-based voter in the typical TMR designs is highly sensitive to soft errors and the design diversity of the triplicated module, which may result in an error for a small difference between the output of the TMR modules. However, a wide range of applications deployed in critical systems are inherently error-resilient, i.e., they can tolerate some inexact results at their output while having a given level of reliability. In this paper, we propose a High Precision Redundancy Multiplier (HPR-Mul) that relies on the principles of approximate computing to achieve higher energy efficiency and lower area, as well as resolve the aforementioned challenges of the typical TMR schemes, while retaining the required level of reliability. The HPR-Mul is composed of full precision (FP) and two reduced precision (RP) multipliers, along with a simple voter to determine the output. Unlike the state-of-the-art Reduced Precision Redundancy multipliers (RPR-Mul) that require a complex voter, the voter of the proposed HPR-Mul is designed based on mathematical formulas resulting in a simpler structure. Furthermore, we use the intermediate signals of the FP multiplier as the inputs of the RP multipliers, which significantly enhance the accuracy of the HPR-Mul. The efficiency of the proposed HPR-Mul is evaluated in a 15-nm FinFET technology, where the results show up to 70% and 69% lower power consumption and area, respectively, compared to the typical TMR-based multipliers. Also, the HPR-Mul outperforms the state-of-the-art RPR-Mul by achieving up to 84% higher soft error tolerance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_20150
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HPR-Mul: An Area and Energy-Efficient High-Precision Redundancy Multiplier by Approximate Computing
Vafaei, Jafar
Akbari, Omid
Hardware Architecture
For critical applications that require a higher level of reliability, the Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) scheme is usually employed to implement fault-tolerant arithmetic units. However, this method imposes a significant area and power/energy overhead. Also, the majority-based voter in the typical TMR designs is highly sensitive to soft errors and the design diversity of the triplicated module, which may result in an error for a small difference between the output of the TMR modules. However, a wide range of applications deployed in critical systems are inherently error-resilient, i.e., they can tolerate some inexact results at their output while having a given level of reliability. In this paper, we propose a High Precision Redundancy Multiplier (HPR-Mul) that relies on the principles of approximate computing to achieve higher energy efficiency and lower area, as well as resolve the aforementioned challenges of the typical TMR schemes, while retaining the required level of reliability. The HPR-Mul is composed of full precision (FP) and two reduced precision (RP) multipliers, along with a simple voter to determine the output. Unlike the state-of-the-art Reduced Precision Redundancy multipliers (RPR-Mul) that require a complex voter, the voter of the proposed HPR-Mul is designed based on mathematical formulas resulting in a simpler structure. Furthermore, we use the intermediate signals of the FP multiplier as the inputs of the RP multipliers, which significantly enhance the accuracy of the HPR-Mul. The efficiency of the proposed HPR-Mul is evaluated in a 15-nm FinFET technology, where the results show up to 70% and 69% lower power consumption and area, respectively, compared to the typical TMR-based multipliers. Also, the HPR-Mul outperforms the state-of-the-art RPR-Mul by achieving up to 84% higher soft error tolerance.
title HPR-Mul: An Area and Energy-Efficient High-Precision Redundancy Multiplier by Approximate Computing
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20150