Field Programmability of Supply Voltages for FPGA Power Reduction

Abstract

Power reduction is of growing importance for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In this paper, we apply programmable supply voltage (Vdd) to reduce FPGA power. We first design FPGA logic fabrics using dual-Vdd levels and show that field-programmable power supply is required to obtain a satisfactory power-versus-performance tradeoff. We further design FPGA interconnect fabrics for fine-grained Vdd programmability with minimal increase of the number of configuration static-random-access-memory cells. With a simple yet practical computer-aided design flow to leverage the field-programmable dual-Vdd logic and interconnect fabrics, we carry out a highly quantitative study using placed and routed benchmark circuits, and delay, power, and area models obtained from detailed circuit designs. Compared to single-Vdd FPGAs with the Vdd level suggested by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors for 100-nm technology, field-programmable dual-Vdd FPGAs reduce the total power by 47.61% and the energy-delay product by 27.36%