Automated synthesis of approximate circuits via functional approximations is of prominent importance to provide efficiency in energy, runtime, and chip area required to execute an application. Approximate circuits are usually obtained either through analytical approximation methods leveraging approximate transformations such as bit-width scaling or via iterative search-based optimization methods when a library of approximate components, e.g., approximate adders and multipliers, is available. For the latter, exploring the extremely large design space is challenging in terms of both computations and quality of results. While the combination of both methods can create more room for further approximations, the \textit{Design Space Exploration}~(DSE) becomes a crucial issue. In this paper, we present such a hybrid synthesis methodology that applies a low-cost analytical method followed by parallel stochastic search-based optimization. We address the DSE challenge through efficient pruning of the design space and skipping unnecessary expensive testing and/or verification steps. The experimental results reveal up to 10.57x area savings in comparison with both purely analytical or search-based approaches.

State-of-the-art frameworks for generating approximate circuits automatically explore the search space in an iterative process - often greedily. Synthesis and verification processes are invoked in each iteration to evaluate the found solutions and to guide the search algorithm. As a result, a large number of approximate circuits is subjected to analysis - leading to long runtimes - but only a few approximate circuits might form an acceptable solution. In this paper, we present our Jump Search (JS) method which seeks to reduce the runtime of an approximation process by reducing the number of expensive synthesis and verification steps. To reduce the runtime, JS computes impact factors for each approximation candidate in the circuit to create a selection of approximate circuits without invoking synthesis or verification processes. We denote the selection as path from which JS determines the final solution. In our experimental results, JS achieved speed-ups of up to 57x while area savings remain comparable to the reference search method, Simulated Annealing.

Approximate computing has become a very popular design strategy that exploits error resilient computations to achieve higher performance and energy efficiency. Automated synthesis of approximate circuits is performed via functional approximation, in which various parts of the target circuit are extensively examined with a library of approximate components/transformations to trade off the functional accuracy and computational budget (i.e., power). However, as the number of possible approximate transformations increases, traditional search techniques suffer from a combinatorial explosion due to the large branching factor. In this work, we present a comprehensive framework for automated synthesis of approximate circuits from either structural or behavioral descriptions. We adapt the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), as a stochastic search technique, to deal with the large design space exploration, which enables a broader range of potential possible approximations through lightweight random simulations. The proposed framework is able to recognize the design Pareto set even with low computational budgets. Experimental results highlight the capabilities of the proposed synthesis framework by resulting in up to 61.69% energy saving while maintaining the predefined quality constraints.