Approximate Error Detection-Correction for efficient Adaptive Voltage Over-Scaling

作者：Rizzo, Roberto G.^*; Calimera, Andrea; Zhou, Jun

来源：Integration, the VLSI Journal, 2018, 63: 220-231.

DOI：10.1016/j.vlsi.2018.04.008

• Error Detection-Correction
• Energy optimization
• Error-resilient applications
• Adaptive Voltage Over-Scaling

This paper introduces Approximate Error Detection-Correction (AED-C), an error management scheme suited to adaptive power management on error resilient applications. Inspired by the working principle of Approximate Computing, AED-C implements energy-accuracy scaling using the error detection coverage as a knob: a low error coverage accelerates supply voltage scaling thus to achieve larger energy savings at the cost of quality of-result (QoR); a high error coverage lessens the voltage scaling leading to high QoR at the cost of weaker energy savings. The AED-C mechanism is built upon elastic timing monitors, Razor flip-flops augmented with a tunable detection window and hardened with the aid of a dynamic short-path padding technique. Simulations over a representative set of circuits provide a comparative analysis with the state-of-art. The collected results show AED-C substantially reduces the average energy-per-operation (up to 44.7% savings w.r.t. Razor-driven Adaptive Voltage Over-Scaling) and the area overhead (3.3% vs. 62.0%), still guaranteeing reasonable QoR. When applied to a real-life application, i.e., Forward Discrete Cosine Transform Unit (FDCT) integrated into a JPEG compressor, AED-C shows 51.9% energy savings (w.r.t. a baseline FDCT implementation) and a PSNR of 48.45dB (w.r.t. baseline JPEG images).

• 出版日期2018-9
• 单位电子科技大学