Platform for Ultra-Low Power Devices
Objectives
The IcySoC project ambitions to demultiply the energy efficiency gains by combining multi-processor variation tolerant platform, inexact and approximate arithmetic accelerators and sub/near-threshold voltage design.
Approximate computing
Approximate and error tolerant circuits are a new radical approach trading calculation accuracy to better speed, power, area and yield. A large class of energy constrained systems, particularly in multimedia applications (video, image, audio) and data mining (search, recognition, machine learning) that lend themselves readily for such a design philosophy.
While sub/near-threshold design offers the minimal power and energy consumption, this approach deteriorates circuit performances and robustness. Inexact arithmetic circuit design and variation tolerant system architecture can address these practical issues.
Research
ICLAB focuses its research on designing low-level inexact arithmetic circuits based on probabilistic pruning and speculative circuits and on integrating them into application-optimized codecs and algorithms.