Jump Search: A Fast Technique for the Synthesis of Approximate Circuits Witschen, Linus Matthias Ghasemzadeh Mohammadi, Hassan Artmann, Matthias Platzner, Marco Approximate computing design automation parameter selection circuit synthesis State-of-the-art frameworks for generating approximate circuits automatically explore the search space in an iterative process - often greedily. Synthesis and verification processes are invoked in each iteration to evaluate the found solutions and to guide the search algorithm. As a result, a large number of approximate circuits is subjected to analysis - leading to long runtimes - but only a few approximate circuits might form an acceptable solution. In this paper, we present our Jump Search (JS) method which seeks to reduce the runtime of an approximation process by reducing the number of expensive synthesis and verification steps. To reduce the runtime, JS computes impact factors for each approximation candidate in the circuit to create a selection of approximate circuits without invoking synthesis or verification processes. We denote the selection as path from which JS determines the final solution. In our experimental results, JS achieved speed-ups of up to 57x while area savings remain comparable to the reference search method, Simulated Annealing. ACM 2019 info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject doc-type:conferenceObject text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794 https://ris.uni-paderborn.de/record/10577 Witschen LM, Ghasemzadeh Mohammadi H, Artmann M, Platzner M. Jump Search: A Fast Technique for the Synthesis of Approximate Circuits. In: <i>Proceedings of the 2019 on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI  - GLSVLSI ’19</i>. New York, NY, USA: ACM; 2019. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3299874.3317998">10.1145/3299874.3317998</a> eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1145/3299874.3317998 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/isbn/9781450362528 info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess