Partially-Precise Computing Paradigm for Efficient Hardware Implementation of Application-Specific Embedded Systems

Abstract: Nowadays, the number of emerging embedded systems rapidly grows in many application domains, due to recent advances in artificial intelligence and internet of things. The main inherent specification of these application-specific systems is that they have not a general nature and are basically developed to only perform a particular task and therefore, deal only with a limited and predefined range of custom input values. Despite this significant feature, these emerging applications are still conventionally implemented using general-purpose and precise digital computational blocks, which are essentially developed to provide the correct result for all possible input values. This highly degrades the physical properties of these applications while does not improve their functionality. To resolve this conflict, a novel computational paradigm named as partially-precise computing is introduced in this paper, based on an inspiration from the brain information reduction hypothesis as a tenet of neuroscience. The main specification of a Partially-Precise Computational (PPC) block is that it provides the precise result only for a desired, limited, and predefined set of input values. This relaxes its internal structure which results in improved physical properties with respect to a conventional precise block. The PPC blocks improve the implementation costs of the embedded applications, with a negligible or even without any output quality degradation with respect to the conventional implementation. The applicability and efficiency of the first instances of PPC adders and multipliers in a Gaussian denoising filter, an image blending and a face recognition neural network are demonstrated by means of a wide range of simulation and synthesis results.