A Survey of Approximate Computing: From Arithmetic Units Design to High-Level Applications

Realizing a high-performance and energy-efficient circuit system is one of the critical tasks for circuit designers. Conventional researchers always concentrated on the tradeoffs between the energy and the performance in circuit and system design based on accurate computing. However, as video/image processing and machine learning algorithms are widespread, the technique of approximate computing in these applications has become a hot topic. The errors caused by approximate computing could be tolerated by these applications with specific processing or algorithms, and large improvements in performance or power savings could be achieved with some acceptable loss in final output quality. This paper presents a survey of approximate computing from arithmetic units design to high-level applications, in which we try to give researchers a comprehensive and insightful understanding of approximate computing. We believe that approximate computing will play an important role in the circuit and system design in the future, especially with the rapid development of artificial intelligence algorithms and their related applications.