A Retrospective and Prospective View of Approximate Computing [Point of View}

Computing systems are conventionally designed to operate as accurately as possible. However, this trend faces severe technology challenges, such as power consumption, circuit reliability, and high performance. For nearly half a century, performance and power consumption of computing systems have been consistently improved by relying mostly on technology scaling. As per Dennard’s scaling, the size of a transistor has been considerably shrunk and the supply voltage has been reduced over the years, such that circuits operate at higher frequencies but nearly at the same power dissipation level. However, as Dennard’s scaling tends toward an end, it is difficult to further improve performance under the same power constraints. Power consumption has been a major concern, and it is now an industry-wide problem of critical importance. In addition to power, reliability deteriorates when the feature size of complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology is reduced below 7 nm, because parameter variations and faults at advanced nanoscales become difficult to control and prevent. Thus, to ensure the complete accuracy of signals, logic values, devices, and interconnects, manufacturing and verification costs will increase significantly.