用生成式Transformer自动设计低功耗近似电路,效率远超传统方法。
GTAC: A Generative Transformer for Approximate Circuits
- 分块生成+自进化训练,实现大规模近似电路的端到端设计。
- 相比精确生成基线,延迟降低30.9%,门电路减少50.5%。
- 适合需要高能效的嵌入式或边缘计算场景,尤其关注面积与速度优化。
面向容错应用的近似计算通过放宽功能等价性要求,在功耗、性能和面积上显著提升。传统近似逻辑综合(ALS)依赖增量重写,限制了设计空间探索。而基于Transformer的生成式AI天然具备概率性,适合生成近似电路。为此,我们提出GTAC,一种端到端的任意规模生成式ALS框架。为克服生成式AI的内存瓶颈,GTAC将大电路划分为可处理的子电路,对每个子电路应用生成核心生成近似候选,并最终选取合适候选构成完整设计。其核心生成Transformer采用新型无冗余编码,紧凑表示电路,并通过掩码机制排除违反给定误差边界的方案。借助自进化训练策略,GTAC建立了新范式:相比精确生成基线,延迟降低30.9%,门数减少50.5%;与传统ALS相比,面积节省6.5%,速度提升4.3倍。此外,其无冗余编码使序列长度减少33.3倍,峰值内存降低61.6倍。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Targeting error-tolerant applications, approximate computing relaxes rigid functional equivalence to significantly improve power, performance, and area. Traditional approximate logic synthesis (ALS) relies on incremental rewriting, limiting design space exploration. Meanwhile, the inherently probabilistic nature of Transformer-based generative AI makes it a natural fit for generating approximate circuits. Exploiting this, we propose GTAC, an end-to-end framework for arbitrary-scale generative ALS. To overcome the memory bottleneck of generative AI, GTAC partitions a large circuit into tractable subcircuits, applies a generative core to produce approximate candidates for each subcircuit, and finally selects proper candidates to form the final design. Its core generative Transformer utilizes a novel irredundant encoding to compactly encode a circuit, alongside a masking mechanism to exclude designs violating the given error bound. Empowered by a self-evolutionary training strategy, GTAC establishes a new paradigm that demonstrates superior performance: It reduces delay by 30.9% and gate count by 50.5% over exact generative baselines and saves 6.5% area with a 4.3x speedup against traditional ALS methods. Furthermore, its irredundant encoding achieves a 33.3x reduction in sequence length and a 61.6x reduction in peak memory compared to conventional memoryless traversal.
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