Masadeh, Mahmoud 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7447-1276, Hasan, Osman and Tahar, Sofiène
(2019)
Input-Conscious Approximate Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) Unit for Energy-Efficiency.
IEEE Access, 7
.
pp. 147129-147142.
ISSN 2169-3536
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3MBMasadeh-IEEE Access-2019.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. |
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2946513
Abstract
The Multiply-Accumulate Unit (MAC) is an integral computational component of all digital signal processing (DSP) architectures and thus has a significant impact on their speed and power dissipation. Due to an extraordinary explosion in the number of battery-powered “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, the need for reducing the power consumption of DSP architectures has tremendously increased. Approximate computing (AxC) has been proposed as a potential solution for this problem targeting error-resilient applications. In this paper, we present a novel FPGA implementation for input-aware energy-efficient 8-bit approximate MAC (AxMAC) unit that reduces its power consumption by: performing multiplication operation approximately, or approximating the input operands then replacing multiplication by a simple shift operation. We propose an input-aware conditional block to bypass operands multiplication by (1) zero forwarding for zero-value operands, (2) judiciously approximating 43.8% of inputs into power-of-2 values, and (3) replacing the multiplication of power-of-2 operands by a simple shift operation. Experimental results show that these simplification techniques reduce delay, power and energy consumption with an acceptable quality degradation. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed AxMAC units on two image processing applications, i.e., image blending and filtering, and a logistic regression classification application. These applications demonstrate a negligible quality loss, with 66.6% energy reduction and 5% area overhead.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science > Electrical and Computer Engineering |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Authors: | Masadeh, Mahmoud and Hasan, Osman and Tahar, Sofiène |
| Journal or Publication: | IEEE Access |
| Date: | 2019 |
| Funders: |
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| Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2946513 |
| Keywords: | Approximate computing, approximate multiplier, approximate multiple-accumulate unit (AxMAC), input-aware approximation, image processing, FPGA. |
| ID Code: | 986093 |
| Deposited By: | Krista Alexander |
| Deposited On: | 13 Nov 2019 22:09 |
| Last Modified: | 13 Nov 2019 22:09 |
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