Soft Realization: a Bio-inspired Implementation Paradigm

TL;DR

This paper introduces Soft Realization, a bio-inspired paradigm that improves the implementation of soft computing applications by reducing energy, delay, and area costs, especially when using unreliable nanotechnologies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel bio-inspired approach that addresses the limitations of traditional hard realization, enabling more efficient implementation of soft algorithms on unreliable hardware.

Findings

Significant energy savings achieved

Reduced delay and area in implementations

Effective on both reliable and unreliable technologies

Abstract

Researchers traditionally solve the computational problems through rigorous and deterministic algorithms called as Hard Computing. These precise algorithms have widely been realized using digital technology as an inherently reliable and accurate implementation platform, either in hardware or software forms. This rigid form of implementation which we refer as Hard Realization relies on strict algorithmic accuracy constraints dictated to digital design engineers. Hard realization admits paying as much as necessary implementation costs to preserve computation precision and determinism throughout all the design and implementation steps. Despite its prior accomplishments, this conventional paradigm has encountered serious challenges with today's emerging applications and implementation technologies. Unlike traditional hard computing, the emerging soft and bio-inspired algorithms do not rely on fully precise and deterministic computation. Moreover, the incoming nanotechnologies face increasing reliability issues that prevent them from being efficiently exploited in hard realization of applications. This article examines Soft Realization, a novel bio-inspired approach to design and implementation of an important category of applications noticing the internal brain structure. The proposed paradigm mitigates major weaknesses of hard realization by (1) alleviating incompatibilities with today's soft and bio-inspired algorithms such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems, and human sense signal processing applications, and (2) resolving the destructive inconsistency with unreliable nanotechnologies. Our experimental results on a set of well-known soft applications implemented using the proposed soft realization paradigm in both reliable and unreliable technologies indicate that significant energy, delay, and area savings can be obtained compared to the conventional implementation.