Low‐Power FPGA Implementation

Abstract

As power consumption is directly related to increased temperature, improved FPGA implementations have immediate benefits for the design of the power supply to the complete system; this can result in cheaper systems and fewer components, giving a reduction in PCB area and a reduction in thermal management costs. This chapter looks at the various sources of power and introduces the concepts of static and dynamic power consumption. Then, it outlines some of the approaches applied by FPGA vendors in reducing power consumption. Generally speaking, power reduction techniques either act to minimize the switched capacitance or employ techniques to increase performance by reducing the supply voltage, thereby achieving a squared reduction in power at the expense of a linear increase in area, i.e. C_L or frequency, f. The rest of the chapter is dedicated to two core topics, namely, dynamic voltage scaling and switched capacitance.