Low Power Placement and Routing for the Coarse-Grained Power Gating FPGA Architecture

Ce LI  Yiping DONG  Takahiro WATANABE  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E94-A   No.12   pp.2519-2527
Publication Date: 2011/12/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E94.A.2519
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: Physical Level Design
Keyword: 
FPGA,  low power,  power domain,  power consumption,  

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Summary: 
Since the power consumption of FPGA is larger than that of ASIC under the condition to perform the same function using the same scaling, the application of FPGA is limited especially in portable electronic devices. In this paper, we propose a novel low-power FPGA architecture based on coarse-grained power gating to reduce power consumption. The new placement algorithm and routing resource graph for sleep regions is also presented. After enhancing the CAD framework, a detailed discussion is given under different region size supported by the new FPGA architecture. As a result, our proposed FPGA architecture combined with the new placement and routing algorithm can reduce 19.4% in the total power consumption compared with the traditional FPGA. By using our proposed method, FPGA is promising to be widely applied to portable devices.