Abstract
This paper proposes a benchmarking methodology for characterising the power consumption of the fine-grain fabric in reconfigurable architectures. This methodology is part of the GroundHog 2009 power benchmarking suite. It covers active and inactive power as well as advanced low-power modes. A method based on random number generators is adopted for comparing activity modes. We illustrate our approach using five field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that span a range of process technologies: Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, Spartan-3E, Spartan-3AN, Virtex-5, and Silicon Blue iCE65. We find that, despite improvements through process technology and low-power modes, current devices need further improvements to be sufficiently power efficient for mobile applications. The Silicon Blue device demonstrates that performance can be traded off to achieve lower leakage.
Highlights
Evolving standards, convergence of increasingly complex features, and growing time to market pressure are pushing manufacturers of mobile consumer devices to consider alternatives to ASICs and microprocessors
The design for the Silicon Blue field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is implemented with Silicon Blue iCEcube 2008 development software
We provide a new, application independent methodology for the fabric characterisation of fine-grain FPGAs
Summary
Convergence of increasingly complex features, and growing time to market pressure are pushing manufacturers of mobile consumer devices to consider alternatives to ASICs and microprocessors. One of the problems with optimising for low power in FPGAs is that a designer has to map a particular application onto a range of target devices and evaluate their power consumption by using the power estimation tools provided with some FPGA CAD flows. We focus on the application independent method that allows a fast and easy evaluation and classification of the power consumption in fine-grain FPGAs. The classification is based on several activity modes which reflect realistic high-power or low-power scenarios a device could be operated in. The proposed methodology is intended to provide a fair comparison of existing devices, and should be able to capture improvements in future devices with new low-power features The goal of this benchmark is to provide a simple technique for evaluating and comparing the power efficiency of devices.
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