VMAP: A Variation Map-Aware Placement Algorithm for Leakage Power Reduction in FPGAs

In high frequency FPGAs with technology scale shrinking and threshold voltage value decreasing and based on existing large numbers of unused resources, leakage power has a considerable contribution in total power consumption. On the other hand, process variation, as an important challenge in nano-scale technologies, has a great impact on leakage power of FPGAs. Reconfigurability of FPGAs makes an unique opportunity to mitigate these challenges by their unique variation map extraction. In this paper, a per-chip process variation-aware placement (VMAP) algorithm is proposed to reduce the leakage power of FPGAs using the extracted variation map without neglecting dynamic power consumption. VMAP is adaptive to different process variation maps of various FPGA chips. Experimental results on attempted benchmarks show that power-delay-product (PDP) cost is reduced by 7.2% in the VMAP compared with conventional placement algorithms, with less than 16.8% standard deviation for different variation maps.