RAMAN: Resource-efficient ApproxiMate Posit Processing for Algorithm-Hardware Co-desigN

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Khan, Mohd Faisal, Lokhande, Mukul, Vishvakarma, Santosh Kumar
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909870142259200
author Khan, Mohd Faisal
Lokhande, Mukul
Vishvakarma, Santosh Kumar
author_facet Khan, Mohd Faisal
Lokhande, Mukul
Vishvakarma, Santosh Kumar
contents Edge-AI applications still face considerable challenges in enhancing computational efficiency in resource-constrained environments. This work presents RAMAN, a resource-efficient and approximate posit(8,2)-based Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) architecture designed to improve hardware efficiency within bandwidth limitations. The proposed REAP (Resource-Efficient Approximate Posit) MAC engine, which is at the core of RAMAN, uses approximation in the posit multiplier to achieve significant area and power reductions with an impact on accuracy. To support diverse AI workloads, this MAC unit is incorporated in a scalable Vector Execution Unit (VEU), which permits hardware reuse and parallelism among deep neural network layers. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm-hardware co-design framework incorporating approximation-aware training to evaluate the impact of hardware-level approximation on application-level performance. Empirical validation on FPGA and ASIC platforms shows that the proposed REAP MAC achieves up to 46% in LUT savings and 35.66% area, 31.28% power reduction, respectively, over the baseline Posit Dot-Product Unit (PDPU) design, while maintaining high accuracy (98.45%) for handwritten digit recognition. RAMAN demonstrates a promising trade-off between hardware efficiency and learning performance, making it suitable for next-generation edge intelligence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22627
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RAMAN: Resource-efficient ApproxiMate Posit Processing for Algorithm-Hardware Co-desigN
Khan, Mohd Faisal
Lokhande, Mukul
Vishvakarma, Santosh Kumar
Hardware Architecture
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Edge-AI applications still face considerable challenges in enhancing computational efficiency in resource-constrained environments. This work presents RAMAN, a resource-efficient and approximate posit(8,2)-based Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) architecture designed to improve hardware efficiency within bandwidth limitations. The proposed REAP (Resource-Efficient Approximate Posit) MAC engine, which is at the core of RAMAN, uses approximation in the posit multiplier to achieve significant area and power reductions with an impact on accuracy. To support diverse AI workloads, this MAC unit is incorporated in a scalable Vector Execution Unit (VEU), which permits hardware reuse and parallelism among deep neural network layers. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm-hardware co-design framework incorporating approximation-aware training to evaluate the impact of hardware-level approximation on application-level performance. Empirical validation on FPGA and ASIC platforms shows that the proposed REAP MAC achieves up to 46% in LUT savings and 35.66% area, 31.28% power reduction, respectively, over the baseline Posit Dot-Product Unit (PDPU) design, while maintaining high accuracy (98.45%) for handwritten digit recognition. RAMAN demonstrates a promising trade-off between hardware efficiency and learning performance, making it suitable for next-generation edge intelligence.
title RAMAN: Resource-efficient ApproxiMate Posit Processing for Algorithm-Hardware Co-desigN
topic Hardware Architecture
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22627