A novel majority based imprecise 4:2 compressor with respect to the current and future VLSI industry

Imprecising the arithmetic hardware blocks is well known as one of the brilliant approaches that increase the performance of digital signal processors (DSP) at the cost of imposing some acceptable errors. Making a trade-off between the performance and the enormous results of a given system is a challenge which has attracted the interest of many researchers in recent years. In this paper, we focus on the design of an imprecise 4:2 compressor which lies at the heart of inexact multipliers. The proposed imprecise 4:2 compressor by utilizing only one majority gate brings significant efficiency in implementation of today's technologies like FinFET and future majority based emerging technologies such as QCA. The evaluation results in both of aforesaid technologies demonstrate the remarkable improvement of the proposed design compared to related works. In addition, employing the proposed imprecise 4:2 compressor in an image processing application confirms the qualitative acceptability of the proposed design. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.