autoAx: An Automatic Design Space Exploration and Circuit Building Methodology utilizing Libraries of Approximate Components

Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for developing highly energy-efficient computing systems such as various accelerators. In the literature, many libraries of elementary approximate circuits have already been proposed to simplify the design process of approximate accelerators. Because these libraries contain from tens to thousands of approximate implementations for a single arithmetic operation it is intractable to find an optimal combination of approximate circuits in the library even for an application consisting of a few operations. An open problem is "how to effectively combine circuits from these libraries to construct complex approximate accelerators". This paper proposes a novel methodology for searching, selecting and combining the most suitable approximate circuits from a set of available libraries to generate an approximate accelerator for a given application. To enable fast design space generation and exploration, the methodology utilizes machine learning techniques to create computational models estimating the overall quality of processing and hardware cost without performing full synthesis at the accelerator level. Using the methodology, we construct hundreds of approximate accelerators (for a Sobel edge detector) showing different but relevant tradeoffs between the quality of processing and hardware cost and identify a corresponding Pareto-frontier. Furthermore, when searching for approximate implementations of a generic Gaussian filter consisting of 17 arithmetic operations, the proposed approach allows us to identify approximately $10^3$ highly important implementations from $10^{23}$ possible solutions in a few hours, while the exhaustive search would take four months on a high-end processor.Comment: Accepted for publication at the Design Automation Conference 2019 (DAC'19), Las Vegas, Nevada, US

Privacy Leakages in Approximate Adders

Approximate computing has recently emerged as a promising method to meet the low power requirements of digital designs. The erroneous outputs produced in approximate computing can be partially a function of each chip's process variation. We show that, in such schemes, the erroneous outputs produced on each chip instance can reveal the identity of the chip that performed the computation, possibly jeopardizing user privacy. In this work, we perform simulation experiments on 32-bit Ripple Carry Adders, Carry Lookahead Adders, and Han-Carlson Adders running at over-scaled operating points. Our results show that identification is possible, we contrast the identifiability of each type of adder, and we quantify how success of identification varies with the extent of over-scaling and noise. Our results are the first to show that approximate digital computations may compromise privacy. Designers of future approximate computing systems should be aware of the possible privacy leakages and decide whether mitigation is warranted in their application.Comment: 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS

Hierarchical probabilistic macromodeling for QCA circuits

With the goal of building an hierarchical design methodology for quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) circuits, we put forward a novel, theoretically sound, method for abstracting the behavior of circuit components in QCA circuit, such as majority logic, lines, wire-taps, cross-overs, inverters, and corners, using macromodels. Recognizing that the basic operation of QCA is probabilistic in nature, we propose probabilistic macromodels for standard QCA circuit elements based on conditional probability characterization, defined over the output states given the input states. Any circuit model is constructed by chaining together the individual logic element macromodels, forming a Bayesian network, defining a joint probability distribution over the whole circuit. We demonstrate three uses for these macromodel-based circuits. First, the probabilistic macromodels allow us to model the logical function of QCA circuits at an abstract level - the "circuit" level - above the current practice of layout level in a time and space efficient manner. We show that the circuit level model is orders of magnitude faster and requires less space than layout level models, making the design and testing of large QCA circuits efficient and relegating the costly full quantum-mechanical simulation of the temporal dynamics to a later stage in the design process. Second, the probabilistic macromodels abstract crucial device level characteristics such as polarization and low-energy error state configurations at the circuit level. We demonstrate how this macromodel-based circuit level representation can be used to infer the ground state probabilities, i.e., cell polarizations, a crucial QCA parameter. This allows us to study the thermal behavior of QCA circuits at a higher level of abstraction. Third, we demonstrate the use of these macromodels for error analysis. We show that low-energy state configurations of the macromodel circuit match those of the layout level, thus allowing us to isolate weak p- oints in circuits design at the circuit level itsel