An Accurate and Time-Efficient Subtractor by Cross Format Coding in Stochastic Computing

Different from binary computation, stochastic computation (SC), as a new paradigm, uses stochastic bit stream (SBS) to encode data. By simplifying computing elements, the circuit area can be greatly reduced. SBS can be generated by a stochastic number generator (SNG) with a variety of formats. In this work, we use unipolar (UP) and bipolar (BP) formats to optimize the traditional SC subtractor, which is named the UP-to-BP Subtractor (UBS). A new cross format coding (CFC) method is proposed for stochastic computing, which combines the UP and BP format, and is applied to Sobel edge detection in image processing algorithms. The fault tolerance and detection efficacy of the proposed CFC method and conventional binary computing are compared in this paper. By using the CFC method, the detected F-Score is improved by 0.15(23%). If the F-score remains unchanged, the processing speed can be about 10 times faster.