Approximate Computing Techniques for Low Power and Energy Efficiency

Approximate computing is an emerging computation paradigm in the era of the Internet of things, big data and AI. It takes advantages of the error-tolerable feature of many applications, such as machine learning and image/signal processing, to reduce the resources consumption and delivers a certain level of computation quality. In this dissertation, we propose several data format oriented approximate computing techniques that will dramatically increase the power/energy efficiency with the insignificant loss of computational quality. For the integer computations, we propose an approximate integer format (AIF) and its associated arithmetic mechanism with controllable computation accuracy. In AIF, operands are segmented at runtime such that the computation is performed only on part of operands by computing units (such as adders and multipliers) of smaller bit-width. The proposed AIF can be used for any arithmetic operation and can be extended to fixed point numbers. AIF requires additional customized hardware support. We also provide a method that can optimize the bit-width of the fixed point computations that run on the general purpose hardware. The traditional bit-width optimization methods mainly focus on minimizing the fraction part since the integer part is restricted by the data range. In our work, we utilize the dynamic fixed point concept and the input data range as the prior knowledge to get rid of this limitation. We expand the computations into data flow graph (DFG) and propose a novel approach to estimate the error during propagation. We derive the function of energy consumption and apply a more efficient optimization strategy to balance the tradeoff between the accuracy and energy. Next, to deal with the floating point computation, we propose a runtime estimation technique by converting data into the logarithmic domain to assess the intermediate result at every node in the data flow graph. Then we evaluate the impact of each node to the overall computation quality, and decide whether we should perform an accurate computation or simply use the estimated value. To approximate the whole graph, we propose three algorithms to make the decisions at certain nodes whether these nodes can be truncated. Besides the low power and energy efficiency concern, we propose a design concept that utilizes the approximate computing to address the security concerns. We can encode the secret keys into the least significant bits of the input data, and decode the final output. In the future work, the input-output pairs will be used for device authentication, verification, and fingerprint