Low power issues for FPGAs - Session 32

Power dissipation is becoming a major concern for semiconductor vendors and customers. If current design trends continue, a typical microprocessor will consume 50 times more power than that can be supported by cost-effective packaging techniques by 2016. FPGAs will not escape this trend; already, FPGA vendors report that power consumption is one of the primary concerns of their customers. Compared to ASICs and other custom chips, FPGAs contain long routing tracks with significant parasitic capacitance; during high speed operations, the switching activity on these long routing tracks causes significant power dissipation. Thus, the development of low-power techniques for FPGAs is very important.