A Novel Approximate Adder with Enhanced Low-cost Carry Prediction for Error Tolerant Computing

Abstract

This paper proposes an approximate adder that employs a novel carry speculation scheme to enhance the computation precision of the existing error tolerant adder (ETA) designs with extremely little hardware overhead. The proposed carry prediction technique leverages two input bits to increase the prediction accuracy while the conventional ones do only one bit. This leads to a reduction of the carry prediction error rate from 25% to 18.75%. Compared to the existing ETA design, the proposed adder reduces normalized mean error distance (NMED) and mean relative error distance (MRED) by up to 10% and 28%, respectively, at the cost of only a two-input OR gate. Moreover, the proposed design outperforms the conventional ETAs when jointly evaluating hardware cost and computation accuracy. Specifically, the new design allows 11% and 17% reductions of area-power-NMED and power-NMED products, respectively, compared to the traditional ETA.