Design and Lifetime Estimation of Low-Power 6-Input Look-Up Table Used in Modern FPGA

Abstract

Due to technological advancements and voltage scaling, leakage power has become an important concern in CMOS design. The implementation of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuit utilizes a portion of the FPGA’s resources as compared to an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Both the utilized and unutilized parts of the FPGA dissipate leakage power. In this work, two dynamic power gating techniques, PSG-1 and PSG-2, are proposed, which are able to reduce the leakage power of the 6-input look-up table (LUT) used in the Xilinx Spartan-6 series. The obtained results show that the proposed approaches PSG-1 and PSG-2 reduce average leakage power by 54.61% and 66.69%, respectively, at the expense of nominal area and delay overhead. The proposed method is also capable of lowering the average total power of the 6-input LUT. The suggested PSG-1 and PSG-2 approaches reduce average power by 53.75% and 60.83%, respectively. However, header-based power supply gating is extremely vulnerable to the negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) aging effect and, due to this, the lifetime of the circuit is reduced considerably. Therefore, in this work, lifetime estimation-based analysis is performed by varying the stress probability of the sleep transistor. The results show that the LUT with PSG-1 and PSG-2 techniques has a lifetime of 4.55 years and 11.13 years, respectively. The stress time of the sleep transistor is 50% for the PSG-1 technique and 25% for the PSG-2 technique, respectively.