Duty Cycle Aware Application Design using FPGAs

  • Authors:
  • Sumit Mohanty;Viktor K. Prasanna

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Southern California, Los Angeles;University of Southern California, Los Angeles

  • Venue:
  • FCCM '04 Proceedings of the 12th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Duty cycle is the proportion of time a device is active. Therefore, based on the duty cycle specification, application (implemented using the device) execution can be modeled as alternate active and inactive phases. For FPGAs, during inactive phases, energy is dissipated due to leakage current and clock signal distribution. If the duration of the inactive phases is significantly larger than that of the active phases, optimizing energy dissipation during inactive phases contributes significantly towards the overall energy efficiency. We present a design tool for the evaluation of various optimization techniques such as shutting down FPGAs, transitioning to a low power state, or leaving as it is to minimize overall energy dissipation. We illustrate the tool through energy efficient design of a target tracking application using FPGAs.