Design, Evaluation and Application of Approximate High-Radix Dividers

Approximate high radix dividers (HR-AXDs) are proposed and investigated in this paper. High-radix division is reviewed and inexact computing is introduced at different levels. Design parameters such as number of bits (N) and radix (r) are considered in the analysis; the replacement of exact cells with inexact cells in a binary signed-digit adder is introduced by utilizing different replacement schemes. Cell truncation and error compensation are also proposed to further extend inexact computation. Circuit-level performance and the error characteristics of the inexact high radix dividers are analyzed for the proposed designs. The combined assessment of the normal error distance, power dissipation and delay is investigated and applications of approximate high-radix dividers are treated in detail. The simulation results show that the proposed approximate dividers offer extensive saving in terms of power dissipation, circuit complexity and delay, while only incurring in a small degradation in accuracy thus making them possibly suitable and interesting to some applications and domains such as low power/mobile computing.