Publication detail

Xel-FPGAs: An End-to-End Automated Exploration Framework for Approximate Accelerators in FPGA-Based Systems

PRABAKARAN, B. MRÁZEK, V. VAŠÍČEK, Z. SEKANINA, L. SHAFIQUE, M.

Original Title

Xel-FPGAs: An End-to-End Automated Exploration Framework for Approximate Accelerators in FPGA-Based Systems

Type

conference paper

Language

English

Original Abstract

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.

Keywords

Approximate Computing, Accelerator, FPGA, ASIC, Arithmetic Units, Regression, Models, Synthesis

Authors

PRABAKARAN, B.; MRÁZEK, V.; VAŠÍČEK, Z.; SEKANINA, L.; SHAFIQUE, M.

Released

28. 10. 2023

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Location

San Francisco

ISBN

979-8-3503-1559-2

Book

2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)

Pages from

1

Pages to

9

Pages count

9

BibTex

@inproceedings{BUT185187,
  author="PRABAKARAN, B. and MRÁZEK, V. and VAŠÍČEK, Z. and SEKANINA, L. and SHAFIQUE, M.",
  title="Xel-FPGAs: An End-to-End Automated Exploration Framework for Approximate Accelerators in FPGA-Based Systems",
  booktitle="2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)",
  year="2023",
  pages="1--9",
  publisher="Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers",
  address="San Francisco",
  doi="10.1109/ICCAD57390.2023.10323678",
  isbn="979-8-3503-1559-2"
}