Publications by Vincent Frédéric Camus

Adaptive simulation-based framework for error characterization of inexact circuits

To design faster and more energy-efficient systems, numerous inexact arithmetic operators have been proposed, generally obtained by modifying the logic structure of conventional circuits. However, as the quality of service of an application has to be ensur ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2019

Survey of Precision-Scalable Multiply-Accumulate Units for Neural-Network Processing

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus

The current trend for deep learning has come with an enormous computational need for billions of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations per inference. Fortunately, reduced precision has demonstrated large benefits with low impact on accuracy, paving the way ...

IEEE2019

Design of approximate and precision-scalable circuits for embedded multimedia and neural-network processing

Vincent Frédéric Camus

Density, speed and energy efficiency of integrated circuits have been increasing exponentially for the last four decades following Moore's law. However, power and reliability pose several challenges to the future of technology scaling. Approximate computin ...

EPFL2019

Review and Benchmarking of Precision-Scalable Multiply-Accumulate Unit Architectures for Embedded Neural-Network Processing

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus

The current trend for deep learning has come with an enormous computational need for billions of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations per inference. Fortunately, reduced precision has demonstrated large benefits with low impact on accuracy, paving the way ...

2019

Hardware Acceleration of HDR-Image Tone Mapping on an FPGA-CPU Platform Through High-Level Synthesis

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Mattia Cacciotti, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter, Alessandro Pezzotta

In this paper, the hardware acceleration of a tone-mapping algorithm for High-Dynamic-Range image processing is presented. Starting from the C++ source code, High-Level Synthesis has been performed using Xilinx SDSoC for a Xilinx Zynq SoC device. After an ...

IEEE2018

CASSIS: Characterization with Adaptive Sample-Size Inferential Statistics Applied to Inexact Circuits

Vincent Frédéric Camus

To design faster and more energy-efficient systems, numerous inexact arithmetic operators have been proposed, generally obtained by modifying the logic structure of conventional circuits. However, as the quality of service of an application has to be ensur ...

2018

Design of Approximate Circuits by Fabrication of False Timing Paths: The Carry Cut-Back Adder

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Mattia Cacciotti, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

This paper introduces a novel method for designing approximate circuits by fabricating and exploiting false timing paths, i.e. critical paths that cannot be logically activated. This allows to strongly relax timing constraints while guaranteeing minimal an ...

2018

Combining Structural and Timing Errors in Overclocked Inexact Speculative Adders

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Xun Jiao, Mattia Cacciotti, Yu Jiang

Worst-case design is used in IoT devices and high performance data centers to ensure reliability, leading to a power efficiency loss. Recently, approximate computing has been proposed to trade off accuracy for efficiency. In this paper, we use Inexact Spec ...

Ieee2017

Design and Applications of Approximate Circuits by Gate-Level Pruning

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

Energy-efficiency is a critical concern for many systems, ranging from Internet of things objects and mobile devices to high-performance computers. Moreover, after 40 years of prosperity, Moore's law is starting to show its economic and technical limits. N ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2017

System and Method for Optimization of Digital Circuits with Timing and Behavior Co-Designed by Introduction and Exploitation of False Paths

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

A digital circuit including a signal path with a false path, whereby the signal path includes at least 3 logic instances, the digital circuit further including a logic monitoring element for monitoring a part of the digital circuit, and for outputting a cu ...

2017

Approximate FPGA Implementation of CORDIC for Tactile Data Processing using Speculative Adders

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus

In most robotic and biomedical applications, the interest for real-time embedded systems with tactile ability has been growing. For example in prosthetics, a dedicated portable system is needed for developing wearable devices. The main challenges for such ...

2017

Design of Energy-Efficient Discrete Cosine Transform using Pruned Arithmetic Circuits

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

Inexact circuits and approximate computing have been gaining a lot of interest in order to improve performances and energy efficiency beyond the boundaries of conventional digital circuits. Image and video processing is one of the best candidate for applyi ...

IEEE2016

A Low-power Carry Cut-Back Approximate Adder with Fixed-point Implementation and Floating-point Precision

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

This paper introduces an approximate adder architecture based on a digital quasi-feedback technique called Carry Cut-Back in which high-significance stages can cut the carry propagation chain at lower-significance positions. This lightweight approach preve ...

Ieee2016

Approximate 32-Bit Floating-Point Unit Design with 53% Power-Area Product Reduction

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

The floating-point unit is one of the most common building block in any computing system and is used for a huge number of applications. By combining two state-of-the-art techniques of imprecise hardware, namely Gate-Level Pruning and Inexact Speculative Ad ...

Ieee2016

Energy-Efficient Digital Design Through Inexact and Approximate Arithmetic Circuits

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

Inexact and approximate circuit design is a promising approach to improve performance and energy efficiency in technology-scaled and low-power digital systems. Such strategy is suitable for error tolerant applications involving perceptive or statistical ou ...

2015

Automatic Generation of Inexact Digital Circuits by Gate-level Pruning

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

Inexact or approximate circuits show great ability to reduce power consumption at the cost of occasional errors in comparison to their conventional counterparts. Even though the benefits of such circuits have been proven for many applications, they are not ...

2015

Energy-Efficient Inexact Speculative Adder with High Performance and Accuracy Control

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

Inexact and approximate circuit design is a promising approach to improve performance and energy efficiency in technology-scaled and low-power digital systems. Such strategy is suitable for error-tolerant applications involving perceptive or statistical ou ...

2015

Near/Sub-Threshold Circuits and Approximate Computing: The Perfect Combination for Ultra-Low-Power Systems

Christian Enz, Vincent Frédéric Camus, Jérémy Lucien Maurice Schlachter

While sub/near-threshold design offers the minimal power and energy consumption, such approach strongly deteriorates circuit performances and robustness against PVT (process/voltage/temperature) variations, leading to gigantic speed penalties and large sil ...

IEEE2015