CIRCA: Towards a Modular and Extensible Framework for Approximate Circuit Generation

Existing approaches and tools for the generation of approximate circuits often lack generality and are restricted to certain circuit types, approximation techniques, and quality assurance methods. Moreover, only few tools are publicly available. This hinders the development and evaluation of new techniques for approximating circuits and their comparison to previous approaches. In this paper, we first analyze and classify related approaches and then present CIRCA, our flexible framework for search-based approximate circuit generation. CIRCA is developed with a focus on modularity and extensibility. We present the architecture of CIRCA with its clear separation into stages and functional blocks, report on the current prototype, and show initial experiments.