SEERAD: A High Speed yet Energy-Efficient Rounding-based Approximate Divider

In this paper, a high speed yet energy-efficient approximate divider for error resilient applications is proposed. For the division operation, the divisor is rounded to a value with a specific form resulting in the transformation of the division operation to the multiplication one. The proposed approximate divider enjoys the flexibility of increasing the accuracy at the price of higher delay and hardware usage. The efficacy of the proposed approximate divider is evaluated in comparison to three different implementations of the SRT divider. The results show that the delay and energy consumption of the proposed approximate divider are, on average, 14 and 300 times smaller than those of the Radix-2 SRT with the carry-save reminder computation. Additionally, the effectiveness of the proposed approximate divider is studied in an image division operation performed in image processing applications. The results suggest the appropriateness of the proposed approximate divider for digital signal processing applications.