IMAC : Integrated Multiply and Addition

This site is part of the paper "IMAC: A Pre-Multiplier and Integrated Reduction Based Multiply-And-Accumulate Unit" submitted to GLSVLSI 2023.

IMAC: A Pre-Multiplier and Integrated Reduction Based Multiply-And-Accumulate Unit 

Abstract : "Multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) units are primarily utilized for convolution operations targeted towards signal and image processing workload. The compressors are applied at the partial product reduction stages to extract the multiplier output bits, which are later accumulated with an extra adder unit. The paper proposes an integrated approach where the other operand of the MAC unit is directly fed to the partial-product-matrix (PPM) before the product bits are evaluated. This integrated Multiplier-and-Accumulate (IMAC) approach saves an additional adder unit and instead extends the compressor, which is already used to reduce partial-product bits of the multiplier design. Compressors employed exact and approximate IMAC architectures were designed and evaluated through ASIC and FPGA flow. Five versions of inexact IMAC design were independently compared with traditional one-level approximation and two-level approximation in MAC designs. The proposed work is found to be hardware efficient when compared with state-of-art MAC units. The error metrics were either comparable or better for IMAC design when compared with separately designed approximate multipliers followed by exact or approximate adder units. The image blending application was considered to measure the quality metrics. The proposed IMAC design files are made freely available for further usage by the research and development community."