Reducing the power consumption of FPGAs through retiming

High power dissipation is one of the major disadvantages of FPGAs. A main part of the power consumed is caused by glitches. This paper analyzes the effect of retiming to reduce the power dissipation of a Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA. The authors introduce a method to insert staging registers into large designs, that are constructed from a high abstraction level language algorithmic description. Results obtained by measurements suggest a high potential for power savings through retiming.