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Approximate Logic Synthesis in the Loop for Designing Low-Power Neural Network Accelerator

Approximate computing is an emerging circuit design paradigm. It improves the energy efficiency of circuits by introducing some errors. Recent works propose to apply approximate multipliers to design low-power neural network (NN) accelerators. Different from existing methods, in this paper, we advocate a method that integrates approximate logic synthesis (ALS) into the design loop of low-power NN accelerators. ALS automatically synthesizes a good approximate circuit and can take input distribution into consideration. With the help of ALS, the NN computation pattern can be exploited to design an approximate multiplier that fits better with the NN. The experimental results show that the proposed method can generate an extremely small approximate multiplier with area only 4.2% of the accurate version, while it can still achieve a high accuracy of 97.9% for LeNet-5 on MNIST dataset.