Multiplexer Based Error Efficient Fixed-Width Adder Tree Design For Signal Processing Applications
Multiplexer Based Error Efficient Fixed-Width Adder Tree Design For Signal Processing Applications
2, 2023
Multiplexer Based Error Efficient Fixed-Width Adder Tree Design for Signal
Processing Applications
Rashmi Seethur1, Deeksha Sudarshan2, Vaibhavi Naik3, Tushar Masur4, and Shreedhar H K5
1,2,3,4
Rashmi Seethur, Deeksha Sudarshan, Vaibhavi Naik and Tushar Masur, Electronics and Communication Engineering
Department, PES University, Bangalore, India
5
Shreedhar H K, Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, GAT, Bangalore, India
Email: [email protected]
Abstract— In copious mixed media applications, humans cannot including logic, architecture, and algorithm [5]. The
necessarily discern error free or erroneous outputs, owing to the approximation computing paradigm is exclusive to a few
small range of perception abilities. Crucial information can still be hardware implementations of DSP blocks. Hardware, software,
obtained from marginally inexact outputs. Leveraging this, many and memory storage all fall under the umbrella of approximate
algorithms such as Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Discrete computing. Research on approximate hardware
Cosine Transform (DCT), Motion Compensation (MC) use implementations are mostly concentrated on arithmetic and
approximate calculations while still maintaining appreciable logic circuits. Since addition and multiplication are often
computation accuracy. When data processing algorithms are
carried out in microprocessors and digital signal processors,
taken into consideration, adders play an important role in the
adders and multipliers have drawn a lot of interest in the field
arithmetic module by managing the power and area utilization of
of approximate arithmetic circuits. This has led to an increased
the system. A fixed-width adder tree design for approximate
calculations is proposed, that uses the trade-off between area and usage of low-power and area-efficient methodologies. To
accuracy as the base for analysis. Our design uses 12.42%, 18.17% support this, signal processing systems are realized on fixed-
and 5.05% lesser area compared to the full width adder tree, FX- point VLSI applications. This paper talks about approximation
AT-PT and FX-AT-DT respectively. Additionally, when compared adders, which are created by inserting errors into an exact adder.
to FX-AT-DT, TFX-AT and ITFX-AT, the proposed design has an There are essentially two different types of approximate adders:
improved Maximum Error Distance (MED) of (33.33%, 29.03%), static approximate adders (SAAs) and dynamic approximate
(63.64%, 65.63%) and (38.46%, 35.29%) for N = 8, 16 respectively. adders (DAAs) as discussed in [2]. When compared to an
To cope with the inaccuracy caused by truncation, the proposed accurate adder, a SAA's fixed approximation feature ensures
design employs mux-based radix-4 addition coupled with bias certain savings in design metrics and may output either a correct
estimation. Further, to examine the error performance we have sum or an approximation with the desired precision in a single
incorporated the proposed design and a few other existing designs clock cycle. While a DAA may compute an exact or
into the Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT), to process images approximate total upon request using single or more clock
with different metrics and compare the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio cycles, approximation is changeable in a DAA. DAAs also
(PSNR) of the images. It was observed that the proposed design contain an additional Error Detection and Correction logic
showed significant improvement in the PSNR score when (EDCL) which in some cases proves to be an overhead and to
compared to ITFX-AT and maintains a score similar to that of FX-
by-pass this we can simply make use of the SAA. Typically, a
AT-PT.
SAA is divided into two sections: a precise section where
Index Terms - Full width, Fixed width, Adder Tree (AT),
addition is performed accurately, and an imprecise section
approximate AT where addition is performed incorrectly or inexactly. The exact
component receives more significant adder input bits, whereas
the imprecise section receives less important adder input bits.
I. INTRODUCTION The accurate portion therefore has more importance than the
imprecise portion. Using approximate adders, desired adder-
Artificial intelligence, big data analytics, data mining, machine tree structures can be designed for various applications. Adder-
learning, multimedia processing, cloud computing, Internet of trees are routinely used in matrix-vector multiplication and
Things, etc. are examples of exhaustive computation parallel designs of inner product computation. Implementing
technologies that routinely deal with a data flood, making approximate adder-tree designs in computation intensive
correct computing approaches expensive in terms of time and applications prove to be profitable as a significant decrease in
resources. In these situations, computation that produces metrics such as area, power and error performance can be
answers that are only roughly, inaccurately, or imprecisely right observed when compared to conventional or full-width adder-
might be more practical and cost-effective. For instance, in tree structures. Fixed-width adder-tree (AT) design is often
image processing applications minor deviation in the quality of derived from full-width adder-tree design by implementing
the image is not necessarily captured by the human eye [9]. This direct or post truncation. The full-width AT (FL-AT) generates
provides us with some latitude to do erroneous or a (w + p) bit output for N input vector, where N is the total
approximative calculations. This flexibility allows us to number of inputs, w is the number of bits for each input, and p
develop low-power systems at many design abstraction levels, = log2N, which determines the number of stages in the adder
Fig.4 Input bit matrix of TFX-AT for N=8 and w=8 with constant bias of 4
Fig.3 Fixed Width 1-bit direct truncation adder tree (FX-AT-DT) with N=8 and
w=8
46.15% compared to TFX-AT at the cost of 24.7% area number of bits analyzed by LSP block in the tree is given by
overhead. The design of TFX-AT fixed width adder tree with log2N, where N is the number of inputs. In proposed design the
N=8 and w=8 is depicted in Fig. 6. The details of A and A* LSP is further divided into σ major and σ minor as shown in
blocks are shown in Fig. 7. Here A* stage is used in first stage Fig. 10. σ major is the 2 higher order bits of the LSP and
of the tree design to incorporate 1-bit accurate addition with remaining least significant bit of LSP comprise the σ minor
bias added for error correction. A block is added in subsequent which needs to be truncated in the proposed design. The σ
stages to perform 1-bit exact addition to improve error major bits are used to generate the fixed bias in the LSP stage
performance parameter of the AT. Implementation of the fixed of the tree by computing radix-4 addition. For N inputs each of
bias can be understood by Table.1. Figure 8 shows the input bit w bits, the MSP comprise of w-log2N bits and LSP comprise of
matrix. log2N bits. The σ major is passed through “AXA*” block in first
stage and “AXA” block in the subsequent stage. AXA* block
performs precise radix-4 addition with 1-bit fixed bias. Whereas
AXA block does only accurate radix 4 addition with minimum
area requirements. AXA* block comprises of two 2:1
multiplexer, XOR, OR and XNOR gates and AXA block
comprises of two 2:1 multiplexer, two XOR and AND gates as
depicted in Fig.11. The least significant bit of the input is
Fig.7 A* block for 1-bit accurate arithmetic with bias estimation and A block truncated. The design analysis of AXA and AXA* block is
for the subsequent stages detailed in Table 2.
For MT-FX-AT to estimate the bias of Least significant bit
Table.1 Fixed bias implementation for A* and A block
(truncated part) of LSP, the estimation equation is given by
Fixed A B S CO E[LSP]=N ∑ ( )2 (12)
Bias
0 0 0 0 0
W=number of bits of each input, p-1= LSP bits considered for
0 0 1 1 0 A truncation, expressed as
0 1 0 1 0 block E[LSP]= 2 (1 − 2 )≅ 2 (13)
0 1 1 0 1
1 0 0 1 0
1 0 1 0 1 A*
1 1 0 0 1 block
1 1 1 1 1
Fig.8 Input bit matrix of ITFX-AT for N=8 and W=8 with constant bias of 4 Fig.9 Proposed MT-FX-AT design
PROPOSED
81.7 70.25 86.24
MT-FX-AT
Journal of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 18, n. 2, 2023
REFERENCES
[1] B. K. Mohanty, "Efficient Fixed-Width Adder-Tree Design," in IEEE
Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, vol. 66, no. 2,
pp. 292-296, Feb. 2019, doi: 10.1109/TCSII.2018.2849214.
[2] P. Balasubramanian, R. Nayar, and D. L. Maskell, “Gate-Level Static
Approximate Adders: A Comparative Analysis,” Electronics, vol. 10,
no. 23, p. 2917, Nov. 2021, doi: 10.3390/electronics10232917
[3] V. Gupta, D. Mohapatra, A. Raghunathan and K. Roy, "Low-Power
Digital Signal Processing Using Approximate Adders," in IEEE
Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and
Systems, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 124-137, Jan. 2013, doi:
10.1109/TCAD.2012.2217962.
[4] Y. Wu, Y. Li, X. Ge, Y. Gao and W. Qian, "An Efficient Method for
Calculating the Error Statistics of Block-Based Approximate Adders,"
in IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 21-38, 1 Jan.
2019, doi: 10.1109/TC.2018.2859960.
[5] S. Perri, F. Spagnolo, F. Frustaci, and P. Corsonello, “Efficient
Approximate Adders for FPGA-Based Data-Paths,” Electronics, vol. 9,
no. 9, p. 1529, Sep. 2020, doi: 10.3390/electronics9091529.
[6] M. Meena, S.R. Babu, “Low Power Low Area Efficient Design for
Fixed-Width Adder-Tree,” International Journal for Recent
Developments in Science and Technology, vol.03, no.10, Oct. 2019,
[7] P. Albicocco, G. C. Cardarilli, A. Nannarelli, M. Petricca and M. Re,
"Imprecise arithmetic for low power image processing," 2012
Conference Record of the Forty Sixth Asilomar Conference on Signals,
Systems and Computers (ASILOMAR), 2012, pp. 983-987, doi:
10.1109/ACSSC.2012.6489164.
[8] P. Balasubramanian, R. Nayar and D. Maskell, "An Approximate Adder
with Reduced Error and Optimized Design Metrics," 2021 IEEE Asia
Pacific Conference on Circuit and Systems (APCCAS), 2021, pp. 21-24,
doi: 10.1109/APCCAS51387.2021.9687757.
[9] B. Khaleghi, S. Salamat, A. Thomas, F. Asgarinejad, Y. Kim, and T.
Rosing. 2020. “SHEARer: highly-efficient hyperdimensional
computing by software-hardware enabled multifold approximation,” in
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power
Electronics and Design (ISLPED '20). Association for Computing
Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 241–246.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3370748.3406587
[10] Honglan Jiang, Jie Han, and Fabrizio Lombardi. 2015. “A Comparative
Review and Evaluation of Approximate Adders”. In Proceedings of the
25th edition on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI '15).
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 343–348.
https://doi.org/10.1145/2742060.2743760