Architecture evaluation for power-efficient FPGAs

Abstract

This paper presents a flexible FPGA architecture evaluation framework, named fpgaEVA-LP, for power efficiency analysis of LUT-based FPGA architectures. Our work has several contributions: (i) We develop a mixed-level FPGA power model that combines switch-level models for interconnects and macromodels for LUTs; (ii) We develop a tool that automatically generates a back-annotated gate-level netlist with post-layout extracted capacitances and delays; (iii) We develop a cycle-accurate power simulator based on our power model. It carries out gate-level simulation under real delay model and is able to capture glitch power; (iv) Using the framework fpgaEVA-LP, we study the power efficiency of FPGAs, in 0.10um technology, under various settings of architecture parameters such as LUT sizes, cluster sizes and wire segmentation schemes and reach several important conclusions. We also present the detailed power consumption distribution among different FPGA components and shed light on the potential opportunities of power optimization for future FPGA designs (e.g., ≤: 0.10um technology).