Toward efficient static analysis of finite-precision effects in DSP applications via affine arithmetic modeling

We introduce a static error analysis technique, based on smart interval methods from affine arithmetic, to help designers translate DSP codes from full-precision floating-point to smaller finite-precision formats. The technique gives results for numerical error estimation comparable to detailed simulation, but achieves speedups of three orders of magnitude by avoiding actual bit-level simulation. We show results for experiments mapping common DSP transform algorithms to implementations using small custom floating point formats.