Analysis of voltage overscaled computer arithmetics in low power signal processing systems

Abstract

This work concerns the design of low power signal processing systems at overscaled supply voltage, in which the behavior of computer arithmetic units in response to overscaled voltage plays an importance role. We show that different hardware implementations of the same computer arithmetic function may respond to overscaled voltage very differently and result in different energy saving potential. Therefore, we develop an analytical approach to estimate the statistics of computer arithmetic computation errors due to supply voltages overscaling. Compared with computation intensive circuit simulations, this analytical approach can be several orders of magnitude faster and meanwhile achieve a reasonable accuracy.