Physical 2D Morphware and Power Reduction Methods for Everyone

Dynamic and partial reconfiguration discovers more and more the focus in academic and industrial research. Modern systems in e.g. avionic and automotive applications exploit the parallelism of hardware in order to reduce power consumption and to increase performance. State of the art reconfigurable FPGA devices allows reconfiguring parts of their architecture while the other configured architecture stays undisturbed in operation. This dynamic and partial reconfiguration allows therefore adapting the architecture to the requirements of the application while run-time. The difference to the traditional term of software and its related sequential architecture is the possibility to change the paradigm of brining the data to the respective processing elements. Dynamic and partial reconfiguration enables to bring the processing elements to the data and is therefore a new paradigm. The shift from the traditional microprocessor approaches with sequential processing of data to parallel processing reconfigurable architectures forces to introduce new paradigms with the focus on computing in time and space

Towards Dilated Placement of Dynamic NoC Cores

Instead of mapping application task graphs in a compact manner onto reconfigurable devices using a network-on-chip for interconnecting application cores, we propose dilating the mappings as much as the available latencies on critical connections allow. In a dilated mapping, the unused resources between an application\u27s configured components can be used to provide additional flexibility when the configuration needs to change. We motivate the reasons for dilating application task graphs targeted at reconfigurable devices; derive a simulated annealing approach to dilating the placement of such graphs; and present preliminary results of applying the algorithm to synthetic test cases. The method appears to result in successful and meaningful graph dilation and could be further tuned to satisfy desired power constraints

Power Measurement Methodology for FPGA Devices

The efficiency of power optimization tools depends on information on design power provided by the power estimation models. Power models targeting different power groups can enable fast identification of the most power consuming parts of design and their properties. The accuracy of these estimation models is highly dependent on the accuracy of the method used for their characterization. The highest precision is achieved by using physical onboard measurements. In this paper, we present a measurement methodology that is primarily aimed at calibrating and validating high-level dynamic power estimation models. The measurements have been carefully designed to enable the separation of the interconnect power from the logic power and the power of the clock circuitry, so that each of these power groups can be used for the corresponding model validation. The standard measurement uncertainty is lower than 2% of the measured value even with a very small number of repeated measurements. Additionally, the accuracy of a commercial low-level power estimation tool has been also assessed for comparison purposes. The results indicate that the tool is not suitable for power estimation of data path-oriented designs