FPGA-based Implementation of Signal Processing Systems, 2nd Edition

13 Low-Power FPGA Implementation

13.1 Introduction

A key trend in the introduction was technology scaling and how increasing power consumption has become a worrying aspect of modern computing design. As was highlighted in Chapter 1, this has led to serious interest by major computing companies such as Intel, IBM and Microsoft in exploiting FPGA technology. Whilst in some cases FPGA implementations may offer only moderate computational improvement over CPU/GPU implementations, the equivalent designs tend to operate at much lower clock rates and power is directly proportional to this factor.

Power consumption scales down with technology evolution, and so for much of the 1980s and 1990s the new technology evolution offered an increased number of transistors operating not only at increased speed, but also at reduced power consumption. As scaling increased, though, leakage power, caused by the increasingly imperfect performance of the gate oxide thickness, increased. As the gate leakage is inversely proportional to the gate oxide thickness, this became and continues to be an increasingly important problem.

Even though some would argue to the contrary, the switch to FPGAs could be considered to be the low-power solution for high-performance computing companies, and there are a number of important reasons to reducing FPGA power consumption. As power consumption is directly related to increased temperature, improved FPGA implementations have immediate benefits for the design of the ...