High-level synthesis-based design methodology for Dynamic Power-Gated FPGAs

Abstract

Static leakage power consumption is critical in modern FPGAs for many applications. Dynamic Power-Gating (DPG), in which parts of the FPGA in-use logic blocks are powered-down at run-time, is a promising technique to reduce the static power. Adoption of such emerging DPG enabled FPGA architectures remains challenging as the current tool-chains to program the FPGA does not support this type of power-gating. Moreover, manually identifying profitable power-gating opportunities in an application requires significant design expertise and is time consuming. In this paper, we propose a high-level synthesis-based design framework that exploits the dynamic power-gating feature of the FPGAs to minimize the static power dissipation. We use this framework on a set of CHStone benchmark suite and demonstrate that power-gating opportunities for hardware accelerators can be identified in an automatic way. Results show that up to 96% reduction in static energy is achieved for individual accelerators using dynamic power-gating technique.