Power consumption characterization and modeling of embedded memories in XILINX

To increase their flexibility, latest FPGA devices integrate processors, arithmetics elements and memories; but these programmable circuits have a significant power consuming, which grows up at each process generation. Then it is necessary to develop reliable high-level power consumption models in order to estimate and reduce the power budget as soon as possible in the design flow. Among the FPGA modeling methods, none has integrated the embedded memory yet. We propose here a power model of embedded memory for the Xilinx Virtex 400E based on physical measurements combined with algorithmic and architectural parameters. This simple model is validated in comparison to Xilinx's estimation tool XPOWER and an example of memory architecture design illustrates the interest of such an approach.