Approximate Communication for Energy Efficient Wireline Links

该项目的目标是通过提高有线通信系统的能源效率来降低其成本。为了实现这一目标，该项目将研究通信数据位的准确性与有线链路的能源效率之间的交易机制，并分析如何动态地进行这种权衡。这项研究的动机是这样一个事实，即新兴的数据应用，如识别、挖掘、搜索、数据分析和机器学习，具有天然的弹性，在存在错误数据的情况下仍然可以产生正确的输出。近似计算的概念利用了数据应用程序的这种非常有弹性的特性来提高计算效率。该项目将利用相同的弹性特性，通过近似通信来提高有线数据链路的能源效率。本研究结果将为通信数据位精度与能源效率之间的交换，开辟一个提高能源效率的新维度。这项研究成果将为软件开发人员提供一个控制旋钮，使他们能够开发出节能应用程序。这项研究的成功将激励计算机架构师和编译器编写者为软件开发人员提供能量-精度权衡特性，以实现运行能量感知应用程序的节能计算平台。该项目将研究控制旋钮和最佳参数，以最小的每比特能量达到理想的误码率（BER）。作为本研究的一部分，可重构收发器架构将有助于支持数据应用的动态精度要求。该项目还将研究能量可扩展的通用发射机架构，能够支持不同的脉冲幅度调制（PAM）格式（PAM-4/8/16/32），不同的脉冲宽度调制（PWM）格式（PWM-4/8/16），以及这些调制的均衡方法。此外，还将研究接收机的时域处理电路，以有效地权衡能量消耗和精度。这个项目的方法是独特的，因为它专注于通过精度和能量的权衡来提高能源效率，而其他现有的方法则专注于提高单个有线电路的效率，以获得固定的精度。作为本研究的一部分，能源可扩展技术和架构也可用于实现近似光通信。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The goal of this project is to reduce the cost of a wireline communication system by improving its energy efficiency. In pursuing this goal, the project will investigate mechanisms to trade the accuracy of communication data bits with the energy efficiency of wireline links and analyze how to do this trade-off dynamically. The research is motivated by the fact that emerging data applications such as recognition, mining, search, data analytics, and machine learning are naturally resilient and can still produce correct output in the presence of erroneous data. The concept of approximate computing has leveraged this very resilient nature of data applications to improve the efficiency of computing. This project will leverage the same resilient nature to improve the energy efficiency of wireline data links by doing approximate communication. The results of this research will open a new dimension for improving energy efficiency by trading communication data-bit accuracy with energy efficiency. The research outcomes will give software developers a control knob with which energy-aware applications can be developed. The success of this research will motivate computer architects and compiler writers to provide energy-accuracy trade-off features to software developers with the aim of realizing an energy-efficient computing platform running energy-aware applications. This project will investigate control knobs and optimal parameters to achieve desired bit-error-rate (BER) with minimum energy per bit. Reconfigurable transceiver architectures investigated as part of this research will help support dynamic accuracy requirements of the data applications. This project will also investigate energy-scalable universal transmitter architectures, with the ability to support different pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) formats (PAM-4/8/16/32), different pulse width modulation (PWM) formats (PWM-4/8/16), and equalization methods on these modulations will be investigated. Furthermore, time-domain processing circuits at the receivers will be investigated, which can effectively trade-off energy consumption with accuracy. The approach of this project is unique because it focuses on improving energy efficiency through accuracy-energy trade-off, while other existing approaches focus on improving the efficiency of individual wireline circuits for a fixed accuracy. Energy-scalable techniques and architectures invented as part of this research can also be used to achieve approximate optical communication.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.