An FPGA Architecture and CAD Flow Supporting Dynamically Controlled Power Gating
File(s)bsoul_revised_23Sept2014.pdf (1.83 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Bsoul, AAM
Wilton, SJE
Tsoi, KH
Luk, W
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Leakage power is an important component of the total power consumption in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) built using 90-nm and smaller technology nodes. Power gating was shown to be effective at reducing the leakage power. Previous techniques focus on turning OFF unused FPGA resources at configuration time; the benefit of this approach depends on resource utilization. In this paper, we present an FPGA architecture that enables dynamically controlled power gating, in which FPGA resources can be selectively powered down at run-time. This could lead to significant overall energy savings for applications having modules with long idle times. We also present a CAD flow that can be used to map applications to the proposed architecture. We study the area and power tradeoffs by varying the different FPGA architecture parameters and power gating granularity. The proposed CAD flow is used to map a set of benchmark circuits that have multiple power-gated modules to the proposed architecture. Power savings of up to 83% are achievable for these circuits. Finally, we study a control system of a robot that is used in endoscopy. Using the proposed architecture combined with clock gating results in up to 19% energy savings in this application.
Date Issued
2015-02-12
Date Acceptance
2014-12-28
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, 2015, 24 (1), pp.178-191
ISSN
1063-8210
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
178
End Page
191
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume
24
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Grant Number
EP/I012036/1
Subjects
Computer Hardware & Architecture
0805 Distributed Computing
0906 Electrical And Electronic Engineering
1006 Computer Hardware
Publication Status
Published