An Accurate and Efficient Method to Calculate the Error Statistics of Block-based Approximate Adders

Abstract: Adders are key building blocks of many error-tolerant applications. Leveraging the application-level error tolerance, a number of approximate adders were proposed recently. Many of them belong to the category of block-based approximate adders. For approximate circuits, besides normal metrics such as area and delay, another important metric is the error measurement. Given the popularity of block-based approximate adders, in this work, we propose an accurate and efficient method to obtain the error statistics of these adders. We first show how to calculate the error rates. Then, we demonstrate an approach to get the exact error distribution, which can be used to calculate other error characteristics, such as mean error distance and mean square error.