Publication Details

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. Xel-FPGAs: An End-to-End Automated Exploration Framework for Approximate Accelerators in FPGA-Based Systems. In 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). San Francisco: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2023. p. 1-9. ISBN: 979-8-3503-1559-2.
Czech title
Xel-FPGA: Koncový automatizovaný framework pro prohledávání aproximovaných akcelerátorů v systémech založených na FPGA
Type
conference paper
Language
English
Authors
Keywords

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

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.

Published
2023
Pages
1–9
Proceedings
2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)
ISBN
979-8-3503-1559-2
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Place
San Francisco
DOI
EID Scopus
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"
}
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