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SEALS: sensitivity-driven efficient approximate logic synthesis

Published: 23 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Approximate computing is an emerging computing paradigm to design energy-efficient systems. Many greedy approximate logic synthesis (ALS) methods have been proposed to automatically synthesize approximate circuits. They typically need to consider all local approximate changes (LACs) in each iteration of the ALS flow to select the best one, which is time-consuming. In this paper, we propose SEALS, a Sensitivity-driven Efficient ALS method to speed up a greedy ALS flow. SEALS centers around a newly proposed concept called sensitivity, which enables a fast and accurate error estimation method and an efficient method to filter out unpromising LACs. SEALS can handle any statistical error metric. The experimental results show that it outperforms a state-of-the-art ALS method in runtime by 12X to 15X without reducing circuit quality.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Timing-Driven Technology Mapping Approximation Based on Reinforcement LearningIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.337901643:9(2755-2768)Online publication date: Sep-2024
  • (2023)Data-Driven Feature Selection Framework for Approximate Circuit DesignIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2023.326016042:11(3519-3531)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2023
  • (2023)DASALS: Differentiable Architecture Search-Driven Approximate Logic Synthesis2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)10.1109/ICCAD57390.2023.10323820(1-9)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
DAC '22: Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
July 2022
1462 pages
ISBN:9781450391429
DOI:10.1145/3489517
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 23 August 2022

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Author Tags

  1. approximate computing
  2. approximate logic synthesis
  3. error estimation
  4. partial difference
  5. sensitivity

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  • Research-article

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  • National Key R&D Program of China

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DAC '22
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DAC '22: 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
July 10 - 14, 2022
California, San Francisco

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,770 of 5,499 submissions, 32%

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62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
June 22 - 26, 2025
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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Timing-Driven Technology Mapping Approximation Based on Reinforcement LearningIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.337901643:9(2755-2768)Online publication date: Sep-2024
  • (2023)Data-Driven Feature Selection Framework for Approximate Circuit DesignIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2023.326016042:11(3519-3531)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2023
  • (2023)DASALS: Differentiable Architecture Search-Driven Approximate Logic Synthesis2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)10.1109/ICCAD57390.2023.10323820(1-9)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023
  • (2023)AccALS: Accelerating Approximate Logic Synthesis by Selection of Multiple Local Approximate Changes2023 60th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)10.1109/DAC56929.2023.10247856(1-6)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023

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