CLAST: Cross-Layer Approximate High-Level Synthesis with Configurable Approximate Three-Operand Adders

Jian Shi, Wenjing Zhang, Weikang Qian

Abstract: Approximate high-level synthesis (HLS) technique has been proposed in recent years to produce approximate designs automatically from a high-level description. All existing approximate HLS methods work on two-operand approximate units. In this paper, we propose CLAST, a cross-layer approximate high-level synthesis using configurable three-operand approximate adders. The experimental results show that CLAST outperforms previous HLS tools by achieving 57.0% improvement in area-delay product, while maintaining a high accuracy.