Performance enhanced voltage scaling in FPGAs

As Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based systems scale up in complexity, energy aware designs paradigms with strict power budgets require the designer to explore all viable options for minimising dynamic power consumption. The concepts of parallelism and pipelining have long been exploited in CMOS chips to reduce power and energy consumption. In this paper, a systematic empirical study of the tradeoffs between degree of parallelism, threshold voltage and power consumption under constant throughput conditions commercially available FPGAs has been presented. Results indicate that there is excellent scope for reduction in dynamic voltage by suitably applying the tradeoffs in FPGA based designs in order to achieve energy efficient implementations.