Aging-based leakage energy reduction in FPGAs

Abstract

The presence of process variation (PV) in deep submicron technologies has become a major concern for energy optimization attempts on FPGAs. We develop a negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) aging-based post-silicon leakage energy optimization scheme that stresses the components that are not used or are off the critical paths to reduce the total leakage energy consumption. Furthermore, we obtain the input vectors for aging by formulating the aging objectives into a satisfiability (SAT) problem. We synthesize the low energy design on Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA and evaluate the leakage energy savings on a set of ITC99 and Opencores benchmarks.