Power Characterisation for Fine-Grain Reconfigurable Fabrics

Abstract EN

This paper proposes a benchmarking methodology for characterising the power consumption of the fine-grain fabric in reconfigurable architectures.

This methodology is part of the GroundHog 2009 power benchmarking suite.

It covers active and inactive power as well as advanced low-power modes.

A method based on random number generators is adopted for comparing activity modes.

We illustrate our approach using five field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that span a range of process technologies: Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, Spartan-3E, Spartan-3AN, Virtex-5, and Silicon Blue iCE65.

We find that, despite improvements through process technology and low-power modes, current devices need further improvements to be sufficiently power efficient for mobile applications.

The Silicon Blue device demonstrates that performance can be traded off to achieve lower leakage.