IC/IEM Talk: Logic Synthesis for Approximate Circuits and Its Application
Event details
| Date | 22.03.2024 |
| Hour | 11:00 › 12:00 |
| Speaker |
Weikang Qian, Associate Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract
As CMOS technology is scaled into the nanometer regime, power consumption has become one of the paramount concerns in designing VLSI circuits. At the same time, with the prevalence of mobile and embedded computing, there is an increasing demand for signal processing, multimedia, machine learning, and pattern recognition applications. One feature of these applications is that they can tolerate some error in the computation results. The relaxation of the accuracy requirement for these applications leads to a new design paradigm, known as approximate computing. It deliberately sacrifices a small amount of accuracy to achieve improvement in performance and power consumption. In order to design an approximate circuit automatically under any given specification, research on logic synthesis for approximate circuits, also known as approximate logic synthesis (ALS), is attracting more and more attention recently. In this talk, I will first introduce the background on approximate computing. Then, I will present several of our representative works on ALS, which focus on two aspects, synthesizing high-quality approximate circuits and synthesizing approximate circuits efficiently. I will conclude the talk by showing the application of the proposed ALS methods in machine learning and digital signal processing domains.
Bio
Weikang Qian is a tenured associate professor in the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 2011 and his B.Eng. degree in Automation at Tsinghua University in 2006. His main research interests include electronic design automation and digital design for emerging computing paradigms. His research works were nominated for the Best Paper Awards at 2020 and 2009 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) and 2024 and 2020 Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference (DATE). He serves as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. He is a senior member of IEEE.
As CMOS technology is scaled into the nanometer regime, power consumption has become one of the paramount concerns in designing VLSI circuits. At the same time, with the prevalence of mobile and embedded computing, there is an increasing demand for signal processing, multimedia, machine learning, and pattern recognition applications. One feature of these applications is that they can tolerate some error in the computation results. The relaxation of the accuracy requirement for these applications leads to a new design paradigm, known as approximate computing. It deliberately sacrifices a small amount of accuracy to achieve improvement in performance and power consumption. In order to design an approximate circuit automatically under any given specification, research on logic synthesis for approximate circuits, also known as approximate logic synthesis (ALS), is attracting more and more attention recently. In this talk, I will first introduce the background on approximate computing. Then, I will present several of our representative works on ALS, which focus on two aspects, synthesizing high-quality approximate circuits and synthesizing approximate circuits efficiently. I will conclude the talk by showing the application of the proposed ALS methods in machine learning and digital signal processing domains.
Bio
Weikang Qian is a tenured associate professor in the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 2011 and his B.Eng. degree in Automation at Tsinghua University in 2006. His main research interests include electronic design automation and digital design for emerging computing paradigms. His research works were nominated for the Best Paper Awards at 2020 and 2009 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) and 2024 and 2020 Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference (DATE). He serves as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. He is a senior member of IEEE.
Practical information
- General public
- Free