Exploring Slice-Energy Saving on an Video Processing FPGA Platform with Approximate Computing

This paper proposes a scalable video processing platform on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), providing several slice-energy cost solutions corresponding to different application constrains. Specifically three approximations of multipliers and two approximations of adders, along with the exact designs as well, are presented and integrated as twelve benchmarks to implement RGB to grayscale conversion as a case study. Experimental results show that the minimum slice-energy cost, integrated with approximate#2 adder and approximate#3 multiplier, achieves 25.17% slice-energy saving compared with the exact design by sacrificing the quality of results as 5.69% error for multiplier and 2.85% for adder.