Design and Analysis of a Majority Logic Based Imprecise 6-2 Compressor for Approximate Multipliers
Design and Analysis of a Majority Logic Based Imprecise 6-2 Compressor for Approximate Multipliers | Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for trading off computing accuracy to reduce energy consumption and design complexity in a variety of applications, for which exact computation is not a critical requirement. Different from conventional designs using AND-OR and XOR gates, the majority gate is widely used in many emerging nanotechnologies. An ultra-efficient 6-2 compressor is proposed in this paper. It is composed of two majority gates that lead to low energy consumption and high hardware efficiency. The proposed compressor is utilized in the approximate partial product reduction of a modified 8×8 Dadda multiplier with a truncated structure. Experimental results show that this multiplier realizes a significant reduction in hardware cost, especially in terms of power and area, on average by up to 40% and 31% respectively, compared to exact and state-of-the-art designs. The application of image multiplication is also presented to assess the practicability of the multiplier. The results show that the proposed multiplier results in images with higher quality in peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and mean structural similarity index metric (MSSIM) compared to other designs.