A LOW POWER AND HIGH ACUURACY APPROXIMATE MULTIPLIER WITH RECONFIGURABLE TRUNCATION

Multipliers are among the most critical arithmetic functional units in many applications, and those applications commonly require many multiplications which result in significant power consumption. For applications that have error tolerance, employing an approximate multiplier is an emerging method to reduce critical path delay and power consumption. An approximate multiplier can trade off accuracy for lower energy and higher performance. In this paper, we not only propose an approximate 4-2 compressor with high accuracy, but also an adjustable approximate multiplier that can dynamically truncate partial products to achieve variable accuracy requirements. In addition, we also propose a multiplier and accumulation (MAC)unit. The proposed MAC using approximate multiplier can adjust the accuracy and power required for multiplications at run-time based on the users’ requirement.