MUSIC-Lite: Efficient MUSIC Using Approximate Computing: An OFDM Radar Case Study

Multiple signal classification (MUSIC) is a widely used direction of arrival (DoA)/angle of arrival (AoA) estimation algorithm applied to various application domains, such as autonomous driving, medical imaging, and astronomy. However, MUSIC is computationally expensive and challenging to implement in low-power hardware, requiring exploration of tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, and power. We present MUSIC-lite, which exploits approximate computing to generate a design space exploring accuracy-area-power tradeoffs. This is specifically applied to the computationally intensive singular value decomposition (SVD) component of the MUSIC algorithm in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) radar use case. MUSIC-lite incorporates approximate adders into the iterative CORDIC algorithm that is used for hardware implementation of MUSIC, generating interesting accuracy-area-power tradeoffs. Our experiments demonstrate MUSIC-lite’s ability to save an average of 17.25% on-chip area and 19.4% power with a minimal 0.14% error for efficient MUSIC implementations.