Seminar DCSY - Hang J.: Approximate Arithmetic Circuits and Applications

Abstract: Often as the most important arithmetic modules in a processor, adders, multipliers and dividers determine the performance and energy efficiency of many computing tasks. The demand of higher speed and power efficiency, as well as the feature of error resilience in many applications (e.g., multimedia, recognition and data analytics), have driven the development of approximate arithmetic design. In this talk, a review and classification are presented for the current designs of approximate arithmetic circuits including adders, multipliers and dividers. A comprehensive and comparative evaluation of their error and circuit characteristics is performed for understanding the features of various designs. By using approximate multipliers and adders, the circuit for an image processing application consumes as little as 47% of the power and 36% of the power-delay product of an accurate design while achieving a similar image processing quality. Improvements in delay, power and area are obtained for the detection of differences in images by using approximate dividers.

Bio: Dr. Jie Han received the B.Sc. degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999 and the Ph.D. degree from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 2004. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada. His research interests include approximate computing, stochastic computation, reliability and fault tolerance, nanoelectronic circuits and systems, novel computational models for nanoscale and biological applications. Dr. Han and coauthors received the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures 2015 (NanoArch 2015) and Best Paper Nominations at the 25th Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2015 (GLSVLSI 2015) and NanoArch 2016. He was nominated for the 2006 Christiaan Huygens Prize of Science by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science. His work was recognized by Science, for developing a theory of fault-tolerant nanocircuits (2005). He is currently an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC) and IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology. He served as a General Chair for GLSVLSI 2017 and the IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT 2013), and a Technical Program Chair for GLSVLSI 2016 and DFT 2012.