Synthetic TDR Measurements for TEM and GTEM Cell Characterization

This paper describes the main features of the timedomain reflectometry (TDR) measurement technique and, in particular, the TDR analysis performed using a proper operating mode of the vector network analyzer (VNA), which is called synthetic TDR. Furthermore, some results of reflection measurement, which aim to characterize the impedance behavior of transverse electromagnetic (TEM) and gigahertz TEM cells by means of a commercial VNA in time-domain mode, are presented

KAPow: A System Identification Approach to Online Per-Module Power Estimation in FPGA Designs

In a modern FPGA system-on-chip design, it is often insufficient to simply assess the total power consumption of the entire circuit by design-time estimation or runtime power rail measurement. Instead, to make better runtime decisions, it is desirable to understand the power consumed by each individual module in the system. In this work, we combine boardlevel power measurements with register-level activity counting to build an online model that produces a breakdown of power consumption within the design. Online model refinement avoids the need for a time-consuming characterisation stage and also allows the model to track long-term changes to operating conditions. Our flow is named KAPow, a (loose) acronym for ‘K’ounting Activity for Power estimation, which we show to be accurate, with per-module power estimates as close to ±5mW of true measurements, and to have low overheads. We also demonstrate an application example in which a permodule power breakdown can be used to determine an efficient mapping of tasks to modules and reduce system-wide power consumption by over 8%