Counter-Based vs. Shift-Register-Based Signal Processing in Stochastic Computing
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
EUROCAST 2019
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Stochastic computing (SC) is an emerging computing technique that encodes a real-valued number into a random bit stream, representing a number as the probability of observing the bit one. This representation allows basic arithmetic operations to be realized with simple logic gates, for example an AND gate and a multiplexer realize a multiplier and a scaled adder, respectively. Moreover, the stochastic representation has a high fault tolerance to circuit noise and bit flips. These characteristics - low implementation complexity and high error tolerance - are especially interesting for efficient signal processing algorithms. Many promising signal processing applications of SC require a large number of additions, for example neural networks, the FIR Filter operation or the DFT/FFT computation. For such use cases, the state-of-the-art multiplexer-based adder suffers significant drawbacks, because of its inherent precision loss due to scaling. Non-scaled adders are a promising approach to overcome this problem. It has been shown that two-line encoding formats, signed magnitude (SM) and the two-line bipolar (TLB), are appropriate formats for the efficient implementation of non-scaled adders. In this contribution, we will provide a comprehensive comparison of the UCB and the SRB approach for the non-scaled adder using the TLB format. Moreover, we discuss the tradeoff between the SRB and UCB design in terms of hardware costs.