Dual mode logic-based design of variable-precision arithmetic circuits

• Main Authors: Romero Riera, Paul Patricio, Crupi, Felice, Lanuzza, Marco
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Digital electronics; Multipliers; The Gate; DML
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10955/1709; https://doi.org/10.13126/unical.it/dottorati/1709

Dottorato in Information and Communication Technologies, Ciclo XXXI The ever growing technological progress has an unquestionable impact on our society and, with the recent emergence of innovative technological paradigms, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), 5G, Edge Computing, etc, it is expected that it will take a more and more dominant role in the coming decades. Obviously, the full development of all these new technologies requires the design of specialized hardware to faithfully and efficiently implement specific applications and services. In this sense, the demand of electronic circuits and systems with small area, flexible processing capability, high performance, and low energy consumption, has recently become one of the major concerns in different research areas, such as computing, communications, automation, etc. In this context, this thesis work entitled "DUAL MODE LOGIC-BASED DESIGN OF VARIABLE-PRECISION ARITHMETIC CIRCUITS" aims to provide a contribution in the research of new design solutions for energy-efficient computing platforms, while also keeping high performance. In this regard, several strategies can be explored at different design abstraction levels, from system-level down to device-level. Among these, the design of variable-precision arithmetic circuits is a well-known approach to achieve more energy-efficient computing platforms when dealing with lossy multimedia applications (e.g., audio/video/image processing) where a reduction of the operation precision can be typically tolerated under the acceptable accuracy loss. At the same time, other solutions can be implemented at both circuit- and logic-level. In this regard, a new logic 8 family, namely Dual Mode Logic (DML), has recently emerged as an alternative design methodology to the existing digital design techniques. It was originally proposed as a combination of CMOS static and dynamic logics to allow on-the-fly controllable switching at the gate level between static and dynamic ...