On Applications of Configurable Approximation to Irregular Voltage

Designing LSI chips has proven to be a big challenge. Parameter-process, voltage, temperature, and aging-variations have increased and hence circuit delays are no longer deterministic. Applications working in harsh environments are emerging and continuous power supply sometimes becomes difficult. Furthermore, such a demand of much lower power consumption has translated into voltage over-scaling. Under these situations, the problem of the voltage irregularity has become very serious since the irregularity-induced timing errors might result in system down. To solve it, this paper proposes a technique to exploit configurable approximate computing. By slightly diminishing accuracy, a lot of circuits may benefit in delay from approximation. The proposed technique reconfigures the target circuit to more approximate mode under the conditions of the voltage irregularity. Gate-level timing simulations using an image processing application show that the reconfiguration compensates severe results caused by timing errors.