An efficient hybrid engine to perform range analysis and allocate integer bit-widths for arithmetic circuits

Abstract

Range analysis is an important task in obtaining the correct, yet fast and inexpensive arithmetic circuits. The traditional methods, either simulation-based or static, have the disadvantage of low efficiency and coarse bounds, which may lead to unnecessary bits. In this paper, we propose a new method that combines several techniques to perform fixed-point range analysis in a datapath towards obtaining the much tighter ranges efficiently. We show that the range and the bit-width allocation can be obtained with better results relative to the past methods, and in significantly shorter time.