HSTL IO Standards Based Processor Specific Green Counter Design on 90nm FPGAAbhay Saxena

Abstract

Extending battery life and increase in portability of modern electronic devices and gadgets are the main motives behind the Green Computing which is also known by similar terms like energy efficient design or low power design or green design. Such efficiency is only possible if all the components of processor are also energy efficient. In this work, the researchers tried to analyze the energy optimization possibility in counter design by selection of energy efficient IO standards. The researchers had used High Speed Transceiver Logic for the purpose of energy efficient counter design on Spartan3 (90nm) FPGA (field-programmable gate array) using VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) hardware description language along with the Xilinx ISE simulator for the analysis and synthesis of counters. Spartan 3 with 90 nm low power is used to achieve substantial power savings. Here, researchers have used five different HSTL IO standards for this work. The standards used are HSTL_I, HSTL_III, HSTL_III_18, HSTL_III_DCI and HSTL_II_18. With these sets of IO standards, Researchers had run their counter design on various device operating frequencies (1.0 GHz to 4.0 GHz). The results clearly indicate that this dynamic frequency (1.0 GHz in lieu of 4.0 GHz) scaling had saved 45% of total power.