Exchangeable components

• Input component
• QualityAssurance component
• Estimation component
• Search component
• Output component

QualityAssurance component

The QualityAssurance component (or stage) is responsible for validating the circuits resulting from the approximation process against global quality constraints. Its main function is simply deciding whether or not an approximated circuit satisfies all quality constraints. The result can be used in the search process to recognize boundaries in the search space or eventually terminating the search.

Functions

setup(gen_info: GeneralInformation): None

The setup method can be used to initialize this component by storing the GeneralInformation instance, parsing the global quality constraints from the configuration file and for creating files and directories that are needed for the validation process. The default implementation stores the GeneralInformation instance and creates a directory sqcc_files in the base directory, assuming that auxiliary circuits will be created for validation.

validateCircuit(node: Node): Boolean

The validateCircuit method validates the circuit of a given Node against the global quality constraints and only outputs whether the validation was successful or not. To store the result and make it interpretable for the other components, the Circuit instance’s validated attribute should be set to True and its valid attribute set to the result of the validation.

Note that this method works with a Circuit instance, but gets a Node as parameter. This is because Nodes are the central interface for circuit representations and component interaction. A Node instance however stores a reference to its respective Circuit instance, which is accessible via node.circuit. This attribute will always contain a Circuit instance if the Node was put through the approximation process beforehand.

Since quality assurance techniques are generally very diverse and require a lot of setup and cleanup, this is typically the start of a toolchain or a series of helper function calls. Feel free to add as many more functions as you need to compute the result of the validation.

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