Showing papers by "Paolo Montuschi published in 2018"
TL;DR: The designs of both non-iterative and iterative approximate logarithmic multipliers (ALMs) are studied to further reduce power consumption and improve performance and it is found that the proposed approximate LMs with an appropriate number of inexact bits achieve higher accuracy and lower power consumption than conventional LMs using exact units.
Abstract: In this paper, the designs of both non-iterative and iterative approximate logarithmic multipliers (ALMs) are studied to further reduce power consumption and improve performance. Non-iterative ALMs, that use three inexact mantissa adders, are presented. The proposed iterative ALMs (IALMs) use a set-one adder in both mantissa adders during an iteration; they also use lower-part-or adders and approximate mirror adders for the final addition. Error analysis and simulation results are also provided; it is found that the proposed approximate LMs with an appropriate number of inexact bits achieve higher accuracy and lower power consumption than conventional LMs using exact units. Compared with conventional LMs with exact units, the normalized mean error distance of 16-bit approximate LMs is decreased by up to 18% and the power-delay product has a reduction of up to 37%. The proposed approximate LMs are also compared with previous approximate multipliers; it is found that the proposed approximate LMs are best suitable for applications allowing larger errors, but requiring lower energy consumption. Approximate Booth multipliers fit applications with less stringent power requirements, but also requiring smaller errors. Case studies for error-tolerant computing applications are provided.
109 citations
TL;DR: A tool designed to support computer animation production processes by leveraging the affordances offered by articulated tangible user interfaces and motion capture retargeting solutions, representing an interesting solution also for beginners approaching the world of digital animation for the first time.
Abstract: Software for computer animation is generally characterized by a steep learning curve, due to the entanglement of both sophisticated techniques and interaction methods required to control 3D geometries. This paper proposes a tool designed to support computer animation production processes by leveraging the affordances offered by articulated tangible user interfaces and motion capture retargeting solutions. To this aim, orientations of an instrumented prop are recorded together with animator’s motion in the 3D space and used to quickly pose characters in the virtual environment. High-level functionalities of the animation software are made accessible via a speech interface, thus letting the user control the animation pipeline via voice commands while focusing on his or her hands and body motion. The proposed solution exploits both off-the-shelf hardware components (like the Lego Mindstorms EV3 bricks and the Microsoft Kinect, used for building the tangible device and tracking animator’s skeleton) and free open-source software (like the Blender animation tool), thus representing an interesting solution also for beginners approaching the world of digital animation for the first time. Experimental results in different usage scenarios show the benefits offered by the designed interaction strategy with respect to a mouse & keyboard-based interface both for expert and non-expert users.
28 citations
01 Jul 2018
TL;DR: The simulation results show that the proposed approximate dividers offer extensive saving in terms of power dissipation, circuit complexity, and delay, while only incurring in a small degradation in accuracy thus making them possibly suitable and interesting to some applications and domains such as low power/mobile computing.
Abstract: Approximate high radix dividers (HR-AXDs) are proposed and investigated in this paper. High-radix division is reviewed and inexact computing is introduced at different levels. Design parameters such as number of bits (N) and radix (r) are considered in the analysis; the replacement of exact cells with inexact cells in a binary signed-digit adder is introduced by utilizing different replacement schemes. Cell truncation and error compensation are also proposed to further extend inexact computation. Circuit-level performance and the error characteristics of the inexact high radix dividers are analyzed for the proposed designs. The combined assessment of the normal error distance, power dissipation, and delay is investigated and applications of approximate high-radix dividers are treated in detail. The simulation results show that the proposed approximate dividers offer extensive saving in terms of power dissipation, circuit complexity, and delay, while only incurring in a small degradation in accuracy thus making them possibly suitable and interesting to some applications and domains such as low power/mobile computing.
26 citations
25 Jun 2018
TL;DR: A new design of an approximate hybrid divider (AXHD), which combines the restoring array and the logarithmic dividers to achieve an excellent tradeoff between accuracy and hardware performance is proposed.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new design of an approximate hybrid divider (AXHD), which combines the restoring array and the logarithmic dividers to achieve an excellent tradeoff between accuracy and hardware performance Exact restoring divider cells (EXDCrs) are used to generate the MSBs of the quotient for attaining a high accuracy; the other quotient digits are processed by a logarithmic divider as inexact scheme to improve figures of merit such as power consumption, area and delay The proposed AXHD is evaluated and analyzed using error and hardware metrics The proposed design is also compared with the exact restoring divider (EXDr) and previous approximate restoring dividers (AXDrs) The results show that the proposed design achieves very good performance in terms of accuracy and hardware; case studies for image processing also show the validity of the proposed designs
18 citations
TL;DR: This installment of Computer’s series highlighting the work published in IEEE Computer Society journals comes from IEEE Transactions on Computers.
Abstract: This installment of Computer’s series highlighting the work published in IEEE Computer Society journals comes from IEEE Transactions on Computers.
2 citations
TL;DR: This installment of Computer’s series highlighting the work published in IEEE Computer Society journals comes from IEEE Transactions on Computers.
Abstract: This installment of Computer’s series highlighting the work published in IEEE Computer Society journals comes from IEEE Transactions on Computers.
1 citations
01 May 2018
TL;DR: The design, the analysis and the simulation results show that the approximate techniques utilized in the inexact convolver can operate in synergy, and an error compensation scheme is introduced to remedy a loss of accuracy in computation.
Abstract: This paper proposes an error compensation scheme of two-dimensional (2D) convolver in which both approximate circuit- and algorithm-level techniques are utilized in the design. Truncation and voltage scaling are used as circuit techniques, while bit-width reduction is utilized at the algorithm level. These different techniques are related to the configuration of the convolver by which its operation can be configured to meet different and often contrasting figures of merit. An extensive evaluation of different error metrics is performed. An error analysis is also presented to substantiate the simulation results; an error compensation scheme is introduced to remedy a loss of accuracy in computation. Convolution for image processing is treated in detail to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The design, the analysis and the simulation results show that the approximate techniques utilized in the inexact convolver can operate in synergy.