A high-accuracy approximate adder with correct sign calculation

Conventional precise adders take long delay and large power consumption to obtain accurate results. Exploiting the error tolerance of some applications such as multimedia, image processing, and machine learning, a number of recent works proposed to design approximate adders that generate inaccurate results occasionally in exchange for reduction in delay and power consumption. However, most of the existing approximate adders have a large relative error. Besides, when applied to 2's complement signed addition, they sometimes generate a wrong sign bit. In this paper, we propose a novel approximate adder that exploits the generate signals for carry speculation. Furthermore, we introduce a low-overhead module to reduce the relative error and a sign correction module to fix the sign error. Compared to the conventional ripple carry adder and carry-lookahead adder, our adder with block size of 4 reduces power-delay product by 66% and 32%, respectively, for a 32-bit addition. Compared to the existing approximate adders, our adder significantly reduces the maximal relative error and ensures correct sign calculation with comparable area, delay, and power consumption. We further tested the performance of our adders with and without the sign error correction module in three real applications, mean filter, edge detection, and k-means clustering. The experimental results demonstrated the importance of reducing the relative error and ensuring the correct sign calculation for 2's complement signed additions. The outputs produced using our adder with the sign error correction module are very close to those produced using accurate adder.