Energy efficiency has emerged as one of the most essential design parameters in contemporary computing system design. Approximate computing is a new computing paradigm to achieve energy efficiency by trading-off energy/area/latency improvements with accuracy for error-resilient applications. This paper proposes Reconfigurable Energy-efficient Approximate Divider (READ) that achieves several energy–quality configurable modes using fixed restoring array divider architecture. Conventional approximate binary dividers require various divider hardware configurations to achieve distinct energy–quality trade-off points, which decreases the hardware flexibility, especially for modern embedded systems. READ accomplishes energy efficiency while meeting the dynamically varying accuracy requirements of the targeted application. READ uses reconfigurable subtractor cells that can work in either accurate or approximate mode using a subtractor cell controller logic. The paper also introduces the design of overflow detector using minimal hardware resources. A comprehensive accuracy and hardware evaluation on CMOS 45-nm technology node are performed for the proposed dividers as well as other state-of-the- art divider designs. Compared to the accurate $16∕8$ divider design, the proposed divider shows an improvement of 49% in terms of energy efficiency and is 1.26x faster, while introducing minimal errors. The proposed divider design is demonstrated for its efficacy in image processing tasks and shows nominal effect on the output quality.

能源效率已成为现代计算系统设计中最重要的设计参数之一。近似计算是一种新的计算范式，它通过权衡能量/面积/延迟的改进来实现能效，并具有针对错误恢复应用程序的准确性。本文提出ř econfigurable Ë NERGY高效甲pproximate divider（READ）使用固定的恢复阵列分频器架构实现了几种能量质量可配置的模式。传统的近似二进制分频器需要各种分频器硬件配置，以实现不同的能源质量折衷点，这降低了硬件灵活性，尤其是对于现代嵌入式系统。READ可以实现能源效率，同时满足目标应用程序动态变化的精度要求。READ使用可重配置的减法器单元，该单元可使用减法器单元控制器逻辑以精确或近似模式工作。本文还介绍了使用最少硬件资源的溢出检测器的设计。针对建议的分频器以及其他最新的分频器设计，对CMOS 45 nm技术节点进行了全面的精度和硬件评估。相比准确$16∕8$除法器设计中，建议的除法器在能源效率方面提高了49％，速度提高了1.26倍，同时引入了最小的误差。所提出的分频器设计证明了其在图像处理任务中的功效，并显示了对输出质量的名义影响。