ABACUS: A technique for automated behavioral synthesis of approximate computing circuits

Many classes of applications, especially in the domains of signal and image processing, computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning, are inherently tolerant to inaccuracies in their underlying computations. This tolerance can be exploited to design approximate circuits that perform within acceptable accuracies but have much lower power consumption and smaller area footprints (and often better run times) than their exact counterparts. In this paper, we propose a new class of automated synthesis methods for generating approximate circuits directly from behavioral-level descriptions. In contrast to previous methods that operate at the Boolean level or use custom modifications, our automated behavioral synthesis method enables a wider range of possible approximations and can operate on arbitrary designs. Our method first creates an abstract synthesis tree (AST) from the input behavioral description, and then applies variant operators to the AST using an iterative stochastic greedy approach to identify the optimal inexact designs in an efficient way. Our method is able to identify the optimal designs that represent the Pareto frontier trade-off between accuracy and power consumption. Our methodology is developed into a tool we call ABACUS, which we integrate with a standard ASIC experimental flow based on industrial tools. We validate our methods on three realistic Verilog-based benchmarks from three different domains — signal processing, computer vision and machine learning. Our tool automatically discovers optimal designs, providing area and power savings of up to 50% while maintaining good accuracy.