Accuracy Configurable Adders with Negligible Delay Overhead in Exact Operating Mode

Abstract

In this paper, two accuracy configurable adders capable of operating in approximate and exact modes are proposed. In the adders, which include a block-based carry propagate and a parallel prefix structure, the carry chains are cut off in the approximate mode limiting the carry chain depth to two blocks. In the case of parallel prefix adder, we propose a special carry generate tree equipped with a power gating means. In both of the proposed structures, the critical paths of the adders are not increased in the exact operating mode. Thus, the main objective of proposing these approximate adder structures is to present an accuracy configurable adder structure whose delay in the exact mode is almost the same as an exact adder. The efficacies of the proposed accuracy configurable adders are compared with some state-of-the-art adder structures using a 15nm CMOS technology. In addition, their efficacies are evaluated in two error-resilient applications. These studies show that the proposed carry-propagate adder has 22% (51%) lower energy consumption (error rate) compared to the best prior works. Also, the proposed parallel prefix adder provides, on average, 20% lower energy consumption compared to the exact parallel prefix adders.