Professor Laura Pozzi from USI Logano at FIT: XPAT: A Parametrizable Template for Approximate Logic Synthesis

From 14 to 15 February we will welcome Professor Laura Pozzi from the Swiss University USI Lugano to our faculty. She will start her program at FIT with a dissertation review of Ing. Jiří Matyáš: The use of formal methods in approximate calculus. 

From 2 pm onwards, she will then give a talk in room E104 on XPAT: A Parametrizable Template for Approximate Logic Synthesis, in which she will discuss her research work on approximate computation, a paradigm for inexact computation with the aim of saving energy, area and/or delay compared to exact computation when the resulting error is bounded. The full abstract of the talk is below.

There will be an opportunity for any discussion after the talk and also on the morning of February 15.

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss my research work in the field of Approximate Computing, which is a paradigm for computing inexactly in order to save energy, area, and/or delay when compared to exact computation, as long as the incurred error is limited. After providing a brief introduction to the field, I will focus in particular on a method we have recently devised, called XPAT, to derive approXimate circuits through a PArametrical Template by the use of satisfiability techniques. The method takes in input an exact circuit and an error threshold that a user is prepared to tolerate, and in output it generates an approximate circuit which is guaranteed to never differ from the exact by more than the given error threshold. The method's key idea is to fit the desired approximate circuit onto a parametrical template, and to let an SMT solver shape the final solution by choosing the values of the parameters which will make the error constraint satisfiable.