Publication Details
Xel-FPGAs: An End-to-End Automated Exploration Framework for Approximate Accelerators in FPGA-Based Systems
Mrázek Vojtěch, Ing., Ph.D. (DCSY FIT BUT)
Vašíček Zdeněk, doc. Ing., Ph.D. (DCSY FIT BUT)
Sekanina Lukáš, prof. Ing., Ph.D. (DCSY FIT BUT)
Shafique Muhammad (TU-Wien)
Approximate Computing, Accelerator, FPGA, ASIC, Arithmetic Units, Regression, Models, Synthesis
Generation and exploration of approximate circuits and accelerators has been a prominent research domain to achieve energy-efficiency and/or performance improvements.
This research has predominantly focused on ASICs, while not achieving similar gains when deployed for FPGA-based accelerator systems, due to the inherent architectural differences between the two. In this work, we propose a novel framework, Xel-FPGAs, which leverages statistical or machine learning models to effectively explore the architecture-space of state-of-the-art ASIC-based approximate circuits to cater them for FPGA-based systems given a simple RTL description of the target application.
We have also evaluated the scalability of our framework on a multi-stage application using a hierarchical search strategy.
The Xel-FPGAs framework is capable of reducing the exploration time by up to 95%, when compared to the default synthesis, place, and route approaches, while identifying an improved set of Pareto-optimal designs for a given application, when compared to the state-of-the-art. The complete framework is open-source and available online at https://github.com/ehw-fit/xel-fpgas.
@INPROCEEDINGS{FITPUB13036, author = "S. Bharath Prabakaran and Vojt\v{e}ch Mr\'{a}zek and Zden\v{e}k Va\v{s}\'{i}\v{c}ek and Luk\'{a}\v{s} Sekanina and Muhammad Shafique", title = "Xel-FPGAs: An End-to-End Automated Exploration Framework for Approximate Accelerators in FPGA-Based Systems", pages = "1--9", booktitle = "2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)", year = 2023, location = "San Francisco, US", publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers", ISBN = "979-8-3503-1559-2", doi = "10.1109/ICCAD57390.2023.10323678", language = "english", url = "https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/13036" }