Evaluation of granularity on threshold voltage control in flex power FPGA

Abstract

The flex power FPGA can flexibly control speed and power in a trade-off relationship by a flexible assignment of proper threshold voltage generated from body-bias units to transistors. This paper evaluates static power consumption and an area-overhead by the body-bias units on various threshold voltage control granularity in the flex power FPGA. There is also a trade-off relationship between the static power consumption and the area-overhead for granular control of the threshold voltages. Both a grain size and its style of division have a strong influence on the trade-off. Own evaluation results show that static power reduces less than 1/5 of original level, while increase an area overhead of less than 40%. If an area increase of 50% is allowed, then the reduction in static power consumption to 1/10 or less is obtained