Reconfigurable Carry Look-Ahead Adder Trading Accuracy for Energy Efficiency

The modern portable devices exhibiting multimedia applications demand higher energy efficient signal processing due to limited battery size. The approximate adders have shown a remarkable energy-efficiency over the accurate adders for error tolerant applications. In this paper, three novel approximate carry look-ahead adder (ACLA) architectures are proposed. These approximate ACLAs are achieved by simplifying the Boolean expression of carry generation logic such that the probability of error is small while eliminating number of logic gates. Further, a novel accuracy reconfigurable CLA (Re-CLA) that provides desired quality/accuracy in the given energy budget is proposed. The post layout synthesis results using Synopsys IC Compiler of the proposed adders are computed and analysed against the existing adders. These results demonstrate 37.67%, 18.21%, 18.14% and 15.92% reduction in energy consumption by the proposed 8-bit ACLA-I, -II, -III and -IV adders respectively over the existing approximate adder. Further, the proposed 8-bit and 16-bit Re-CLAs require only 1.92% and 7.08% more energy over the existing CLA for achieving accuracy reconfigurability. Finally, the synthesis results of the Gaussian smoothing filters embedded with the proposed adders show higher energy efficiency with acceptable image quality over the state-of-the-art adder architectures.