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Cycle-Accurate Energy Measurement and Characterization of FPGAs

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Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) play many important roles, ranging from small glue logic replacement to System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Nevertheless, FPGA vendors cannot accurately specify the power consumption of their products on device data sheets because the power consumption of FPGAs is strongly dependent on the target circuit, including resource utilization, logic partitioning, mapping, placement and routing. Although major CAD tools have started to report average power consumption under given transition activities, power-efficient FPGA design demands more detailed information about power consumption. In this paper, we introduce an in-house cycle-accurate FPGA energy measurement tool and energy characterization schemes spanning low-level to high-level design. This tool offers all the capabilities necessary to investigate the energy consumption of FPGAs for operation-based energy characterization, which is applicable to high-level and system-wide energy estimation. It also includes features for low-level energy characterization. We compare our tool with Xilinx XPower and demonstrate the state-machine-based energy characterization of an SDRAM controller.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea

    Hyung Gyu Lee, Kyungsoo Lee, Yongseok Choi & Naehyuck Chang

Authors
  1. Hyung Gyu Lee
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  2. Kyungsoo Lee
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  3. Yongseok Choi
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  4. Naehyuck Chang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Naehyuck Chang.

Additional information

The RIACT at Seoul National University provide research facilities for this study. This work was partly supported by the Brain Korea 21 Project.

Hyung Gyu Lee received the B.S. degree in Dept. of Computer Engineering from DongGuk University, in 1999, M.S. degree in School of Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 2001, and is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at Seoul National University. His research interests include device-level energy measurement and characterization, system-level low power design and low-power FPGA design.

KyungSoo Lee is a M.S. student at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University. He received the B.S. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 2004. He is currently working on low-power systems and embedded systems for his M.S. degree.

Yongseok Choi received the B.S. and M.S. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University. His research interests include embedded systems and low power systems.

Naehyuck Chang received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees all from Dept. of Control and Instrumentation Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1989, 1992 and 1996, respectively. Since 1997, he has been with School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University and currently is an Associate Professor. His research interest includes system-level low-power design and embedded systems design.

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Lee, H.G., Lee, K., Choi, Y. et al. Cycle-Accurate Energy Measurement and Characterization of FPGAs. Analog Integr Circ Sig Process 42, 239–251 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-005-6758-5

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