Cycle-accurate energy measurement and high-level energy characterization of FPGAs

Abstract

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) play many important roles, ranging from small glue logic replacement to system-on-chip designs. Nevertheless, FPGA vendors can not accurately specify the energy consumption information of their products on the device data sheets because the energy consumption of FPGAs is strongly dependent on target circuit including resource utilization, logic partitioning, mapping, placement and route. While major CAD tools have started to report average power consumption under given transition activities, energy optimal FPGA design demands more detailed energy estimation. In this paper, we introduce an in-house cycle-accurate energy measurement tool and energy characterization schemes from low level to operation level. The tool offers all the necessary capability to investigate the energy consumption of FPGAs for high-level, operation-based energy characterization, which is useful for high-level, system-wide energy estimation. It also includes features for low-level energy characterization. We compare our tool with Xilinx XPower and demonstrate state machine energy characterization of an LCD controller and an SDRAM controller.