Performances VS Reliability: how to exploit Approximate Computing for Safety-Critical applications

Approximate Computing (AxC) paradigm aims at designing energy-efficient systems, saving computational resources, and presenting better execution times. AxC aims to selectively violate the specifications, trading accuracy off for efficiency. It has been demonstrated in the literature the effectiveness of imprecise computation for both software and hardware components implementing inexact algorithms, showing an inherent resiliency to errors. On the other hand, the hidden cost of AxC is the reduction on the inherent resiliency to errors of an application. This paper aims at analyzing the impact of AxC on the reliability.