These benchmarks are released as part of the following accepted publication.

I. Scarabottolo, G. Ansaloni, G. A. Constantinides, L. Pozzi and S. Reda "Approximate Logic Synthesis: A Survey" under-review in Proceedings of the IEEE.

The included benchmarks are

• x2: small benchmark from LGSynth 91. Metric: Hamming Distance (HD). Approximate design generated using BLASYS.
• mac: multiply-add arithmetic circuit. Approximate design generated using BLASYS.
• buttfly: butterfly structure. Metric: Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Approximate design is same as exact.
• abs_diff: absolute difference arithmetic circuit. Metric: Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Approximate design is generated using Circuit Carving (CC) technique.
• mult16: 16-bit unsigned multiplier. Metric: Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Approximate design generatered using DRUM.
• mult8: 8-bit unsigned multiplier. Metric: Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Approximate design generatered using EvoApproxLib.
• adder32: 32-bit adder. Metric: Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Approximate design generatered manually.
• fft: 8-point fast fourier transform sequential circuit from ABACUS release. Metric: Mean Square Error (MSE). Approximate design generated using ABACUS.
• classifier: A support vector machine classifier sequential circuit from ABACUS release. Metric: misclassified labels (%). Approximate design generated using ABACUS.

Each benchmark circuit comes in its own folder with four files:

• bench/bench.v original design in Verilog
• bench/bench_test.v testbench for the design in Verilog
• bench/bench_approx.v an example of an approximate design for the original design
• bench/bench_qor.py a python function to evaluate QoR results of approximate design against original design

Requirements:

• iverilog for simulation
• Python3

Usage: To produce the accurate results for each benchmark:

iverilog bench_test.v bench.v

./a.out > res_accurate

To produce the approximate results for each benchmark:

iverilog bench_test.v bench_approx.v

./a.out > res_approx

To compare the results:

python3 ./bench_qor res_accurate res_approx

regression_test is a test script that sweeps across all benchmarks.