DeMAS: An efficient design methodology for building approximate adders for FPGA-based systems

The current state-of-the-art approximate adders are mostly ASIC-based, i.e., they focus solely on gate and/or transistor level approximations (e.g., through circuit simplification or truncation) to achieve area, latency, power and/or energy savings at the cost of accuracy loss. However, when these designs are synthesized for FPGA-based systems, they do not offer similar reductions in area, latency and power/energy due to the underlying architectural differences between ASICs and FPGAs. In this paper, we present a novel generic design methodology to synthesize and implement approximate adders for any FPGA-based system by considering the underlying resources and architectural differences. Using our methodology, we have designed, analyzed and presented eight different multi-bit adder architectures. Compared to the 16-bit accurate adder, our designs are successful in achieving area, latency and power-delay product gains of 50%, 38%, and 53%, respectively. We also compare our approximate adders to state-of-the-art approximate adders specialized for ASIC and FPGA fabrics and demonstrate the benefits of our approach. We will make the RTL and behavioral models of our and state-of-the-art designs open-source at https://sourceforge.net/projects/approxfpgas/ to further fuel the research and development in the FPGA community and to ensure reproducible research.