A Novel Rounding and Truncation based Approximate Multiplier for Reducing the Number of Partial Products

A Novel Rounding and Truncation based
Approximate Multiplier for Reducing the
Number of Partial Products

M.Sudheer Kumar Reddy
Electronics & Communication Engineering
JNTU Kakinada
Kakinada, India

Abstract— In this paper, we present an approximate multiplier in which operands are scaled with truncation and rounding parameters and multiplication is performed by shift, add, and small fixed-width multiplication operations ensuring large improvements in the energy consumption and area occupation related to those of the original multiplier approach. The scalability depends on the truncation and rounding parameters which can be varied as per the requirement. By implementing the truncation and rounding parameters the levels in obtaining final result can be reduced compared to that of exact multiplier schemes. Enhancement of this work is done by improving the accuracy of the proposed multiplier and implemented in range of 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit by comparing the terms like delay, power and absolute error analysis. The proposed work is designed using VHDL, simulated with Modelsim and synthesized using Xilinx ISE design suite 14.2 tool
Keywords— Truncation, rounding, approximate, VHDL, partial products, accuracy, absolute error, energy, scalable
I. INTRODUCTION
In considering the deep submicron technology, power has become a main concern due to increase in transistor count, higher speed of operation and greater device leakage currents. Scaling in nanometer technologies created problems in reliability and testing. So deep submicron technology has much leaned towards power. Commercial success of products depends on size, speed, weight, cost, computing power and battery life. Many DSP applications involve complex probabilistic mathematical models and are designed to process information that typically contains noise. So, for some computational error, they exhibit elegant degradation instead of catastrophic failure. Multipliers are one of the data path operators which occupy major share in a digital system. So, hence a multiplier is one of the deciding factor for system’s performance. In addition, these multipliers consume most of the area. Hence, optimization of area and speed of a multiplier is a major design issue.
Approximate computing is a paradigm where we can reduce energy consumption or boost up the speed at times both. By using the approximation techniques in multiplier techniques one can have the advantage of low energy consumption or high speed. As these computations results in approximate results which are very near with the exact computation, these are best choice for the applications which are error resilient. Most of the recent trending technologies like machine learning, computer vision and image processing are some of
E. Venkata Narayana
Electronics & Communication Engineering
JNTU Kakinada
Kakinada, India

the areas where applications are designed to deal with noisy inputs and generate satisfactory results as shown in fig 1.

Fig 1. Hardware stack in exact and approximate computing [1] In several cases the best useable algorithms cannot acquire exact results every time, occasionally it is besides expense to produce optimal results when dealing meta-heuristics and probabilistic algorithms. Insofar, the designers have largely adopted a notion of exact numerical or Boolean equivalence between the implementation and specification at different layers in the hardware and software stacks. Approximate computing focuses at multiple layers of the hardware/software stacks to trade-off computation accuracy with performance, power, and/or area.The table 1 presents the types of approximations where in the schemes can be applied to various levels of the stack to achieve desired outcomes. In this work we mainly rely on the data approximation as the input data will be truncated to small widths and the shift unit logic is altered with logic 1 to observe reduced absolute error.
The multiplier is used mainly in respective DSP applications and contributes in intensifying the performance of the practical application. This work includes the implementing both truncation and rounding schemes on input operands and produce the approximate results in minimum number of steps in which they are very near to the exact multiplication approach, additionally calculating the absolute error for the 8bit, 16-bit and 32-bit of the proposed multiplier scheme in accordance with exact result and enhance the absolute error by modifying the least significant part of the multiplication process.

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Published by : International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT)
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Vol. 9 Issue 11, November-2020

Selective Approximation Analysis of software code or instructions to suggest a certain accuracy mode for a part of code
Timing Relaxation Relaxing of synchronization, timing and handshaking constraints to reduce control overhead
Functional Approximation An approximate alternative of an algorithm that improves area/power performance
Domain Specific Approximation Leveraging the domain specific knowledge for approximations in applications and their algorithms
Data Approximations Use of unreliable memories, load value approximation, data truncation, data decimation, etc.

Table 1. Categorization for the types of approximation
In general, the process of multiplication involves partial products generation from the acquired operands and cumulate those partial products to a level till two rows are persisted. Now by employing an adder the remained rows adds up to generate final result. The process of approximation can be carried out in any levels of the multiplication process. One can use approximation in the beginning of the process i.e. on the operands to reduce the partial products number for a multiplier. The process of approximation can be applied at cumulation of partial product to reduce the power consumption. By employing an approximate adder at the ultimate step of adding we can achieve betterment in power consumed by a multiplier.
In this paper, we introduce an approximation method for reduced number of partial products by considering truncation and rounding parameters which are denoted by t and r respectively. Previous methods of approximation techniques involves employing either truncation or rounding parameters. In this work, by considering both the parameters we can achieve better outcomes than former methods. Let A and B be two 16 bit operands, multiplication of A and B results 256 partial products. Hence by processing all the 256 partial products we get the result and it occupies large area. So to reduce the partial products we employ scalable truncation and rounding parameters as per the requirement. Let us consider the truncation parameter t = 7 and rounding parameter r = 3 as illustrated in the figure shown below.
The green square represents the “1” in the equation (5) and the orange circles denotes the partial products of approximation and the blue triangles denotes the truncation of bits of input operands. The remaining grey triangles of the operands and the grey circles of the partial products can be neglected. With truncation and rounding parameters mentioned in fig.2 only 31 partial products are required to produce approximate result which is very close with exact. Around 87.8% of the partial products were reduced. This reduction of partial products will increase with increase in bit length of operands.

II. HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION
Block diagram implementation of the proposed signed approximate multiplier is shown in fig.3 which comprises of following units: Approximate Absolute Unit (AAU), which produces inverted results if the input is negative and is not changed if input is positive. For unsigned multipliers this AAU can be eliminated. Leading One Detector Unit (LOD) will provide the leading 1-bit position in the most significant part of the operands. The position of the LOD can be obtained by using
K[i] =

^ I[i] for 0 ≤ i ≤ n-2 (1) Only one bit of the signal K is ‘1’ which says about the
position of the leading bit. For both operands A and B there exists leading bits kA and kB respectively. Truncation Unit (TU) deals with truncating the approximation inputs based on leading one position and converts into fixed width operands. Arithmetic Unit (AU) will implement the addition of truncated fixed width operand along with product of approximated input with unity which can be expressed as TU = 1+(YA)t+ (YB)t+ (YA)APX × (YB)APX (2)
Shift unit (SU) shifts the resultant of arithmetic unit with ka+kb times leftwards to generate the result. Sign And Zero Detector Unit (SZD) produces the sign of the output based on the input operands of the multiplier. SZD will produce zero if any of the input is zero. In case of unsigned multiplication this unit is replaced by zero detector unit.

Fig. 3. Block diagram of proposed signed approximate multiplier
Fig 2. Dot diagram of multiplier

IJERTV9IS110249 www.ijert.org

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.)
Published by : International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT)
http://www.ijert.org ISSN: 2278-0181
Vol. 9 Issue 11, November-2020

Numerical Example of Proposed Multiplier:

Fig 4. Example for 16-bit approximate multiplier
The approximate result [(A × B)APX] = 28901376. Whereas the exact multiplication result [(A × B)Exact] = 29190802. The approximate results are very close to the actual results.
III. ABSOLUTE ERROR CALCULATION
To measure the accuracy of the proposed approximate multiplier we use a parameter named absolute error which is specified as shown below
Absolute error (AE) = (Papp – P)/p (3)
Papp denotes approximate value and P denotes exact value.
Percentage of absolute error can be calculated as
Percentage of AE = [ |(Papp – P)|/ P ] *100 (4)
In considering the calculation of 16-bit multiplier in above section the percentage of absolute error is calculated to be 0.99% of the actual result which is very low.
IV. RESULTS AND COMPARISONS
In the proposed work the shift unit of the absolute multiplier is modified with logic-1 instead of logic-0 and the observations are as follows:

A = 11761 B = 2482
Exact Result = 11761×2482 = 29190802 Approximate result with logic-0 in shift unit = 28901376 Approximate result with logic-1 in shift unit = 28966911 Hence by intensifying the shift unit the absolute error has cut
down from 289426 to 223891.

Fig. 6. Simulation of 16-bit absolute multiplier with intensified shift unit

Fig. 5. RTL Schematic of proposed absolute multiplier
V. CONCLUSION The proposed approximate multiplier in this paper is designed by considering the rounding parameter r = 3 and truncation parameter t = 7. By altering the logic of shift unit the error rate is reduced from 0.99% to 0.76% of the actual result for
16-bit multiplier. REFERENCES
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