Exploring Volatile FPGAs Potential for Accelerating Energy-Harvesting IoT Applications

Low-power volatile FPGAs (VFPGAs) naturally meet the intertwined processing and flexibility demands of IoT devices. However, as IoT devices shift toward Energy Harvesting (EH) for self-sustained operation, VFPGAs are overlooked because they struggle under harvested power. Their volatile SRAM configuration memory cells frequently lose their data, causing high reconfiguration penalties. These penalties grow with FPGAs’ resource usage, limiting it under EH. Still, advances in low-power FPGAs and energy-buffering systems’ efficiency motivate us to explore EH-powered FPGAs. Thus, we analyze the interplay of their resources, performance, and reconfiguration; simulate their operation under different EH conditions; and show how they can be utilized up to an application- and EH-dependent threshold.