Content

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   Acknowledgements
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   Abstract
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   Zusammenfassung
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   Table of Contents
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  Introduction
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   Challenges for CMOS technology in the Nano-era
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   Approximate computing
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   Approximate computing at different layers of system stack
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   Approximate arithmetic blocks
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   The focus of this thesis
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   Contributions of the thesis
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   Organization of the remainder
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  Background and Related Work
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   Automated synthesis of approximate accelerators
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   Approximation instance generation
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   Search space exploration
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   Quality evaluation
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   Error metrics
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  Related works
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   Search-based methods
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   Analytical methods
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  MCTS-based Framework for Approximate Accelerator Synthesis
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   Chapter overview
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   Proposed MCTS-based framework for approximate accelerator synthesis
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   Overview of the framework
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   MCTS and its adaptation to the accelerator circuit synthesis
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   Selection policy
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   Search space expansion policy
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   Selection of approximate transformations
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   Reward function
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  Experimental setup and results
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   Setup of experiments
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   Results and discussion
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  Towards a modular and flexible framework CIRCA
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   Motivation behind development of CIRCA
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  Concept and architecture of CIRCA
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   Input stage
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   The QUAES stage
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   The output stage
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  Search space exploration methods in CIRCA
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   Hill climbing (HC)
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   Simulated annealing (SA)
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   Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS)
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   Bounding the search space
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   Experimental setup and results
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   Setup of experiments
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   Results
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   Further Discussion
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   Chapter conclusion
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  Hybrid Methodology for Synthesis of Approximate Accelerators
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   Chapter overview
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   Motivational example
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   Proposed hybrid methodology
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  Analytical bit-width estimation through EVT
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   Extreme value theory
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   Analytical bit-width estimation via EVT
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  Parallel search-based optimization
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   Parallel MCTS
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  Experimental results
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   Setup of experiments
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   Results and discussion
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   Chapter conclusion
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  Machine Learning-based MCTS
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   Chapter overview
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   Motivation and background
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   DNN enabled MCTS-based AxAC synthesis framework
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   Deep neural network based error estimation regressor models
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   Design space exploration via MCTS
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  Experimental results
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   Setup of experiments
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   Results and discussion
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   Chapter conclusion
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  Conclusion
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   Summary
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   Future directions
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   List of Tables
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   List of Figures
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   Author's Publications
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   Bibliography