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The ever-increasing quest for data-level parallelism and variable precision in ubiquitous multimedia and Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications has motivated the use of Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) architectures. To alleviate energy as their main resource constraint, approximate computing has re-emerged, albeit mainly specialized for their Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementations. This paper, presents for the first time, an SIMD architecture based on novel multiplier and divider with tunable accuracy, targeted for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The proposed hybrid architecture implements Mitchell's algorithms and supports precision variability from 8 to 32 bits. Experimental results obtained from Vivado, multimedia and DNN applications indicate superiority of proposed architecture (both SISD and SIMD) over accurate and state-of-the-art approximate counterparts. In particular, the proposed SISD divider outperforms the accurate Intellectual Property (IP) divider provided by Xilinx with 4× higher speed and 4.6×less energy and tolerating only <0.8% error. Moreover, the proposed SIMD multiplier-divider supersede accurate SIMD multiplier by achieving up to 26%, 45%, 36%, and 56% improvement in area, throughput, power, and energy, respectively.

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While the transistor density continues to grow exponentially in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), the increased leakage current of CMOS transistors act as a power wall for the aggressive integration of transistors in a single die.

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Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) have proved to be viable platforms for health monitoring applications. Targeting energy-efficiency, state-of-the-art (SoA) CGRAs are augmented with approximation techniques, while still maintain acceptable accuracy at final Quality of Result (QoR). However, such CGRAs suffer from overheads of collecting separate Add/Mul/Div units. We propose BioCare as an area-and energy-efficient CGRA for health-monitoring edge devices, which exploits the synergistic effects of multiple approximations across HW/SW stack. BioCare offers different levels of energy-accuracy trade-off through the plasticity of its small PEs, each can support precision-adaptability with a Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) manner. BioCare demonstrates its superiority over SoAs, by achieving up to 32% and 67% area-and energy-savings, with 3.6× higher throughput. In addition to analysis on multiple kernels, evaluations on a multi-kernel ECG application shows that BioCare speed-ups the QRS detection latency by 61%, with 0% loss in accuracy. Our implementations will be available at