Energy profiling of FPGA designs

Abstract

This paper investigates the possibility of energy profiling for FPGA based designs by means of direct board based measurement. We aim to determine how different design parameters and FPGA components usage affect the overall power and energy consumption of the device. The power and energy measurements have been performed on a Digilent Atlys board with Xilinx Spartan-6 device. We have varied the following parameters: the usage of slice-based resources, the usage of DSP block, the usage of BRAM memory modules and the clock frequency. Our goal is represented by the development of an accurate energy profiling methodology which will enable to estimate the power consumption of FPGA designs.