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Towards dark silicon era in FPGAs using complementary hard logic design

Ahari, A ; Sharif University of Technology

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  1. Type of Document: Article
  2. DOI: 10.1109/FPL.2014.6927504
  3. Abstract:
  4. While the transistor density continues to grow exponentially in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), the increased leakage current of CMOS transistors act as a power wall for the aggressive integration of transistors in a single die. One recently trend to alleviate the power wall in FPGAs is to turn off inactive regions of the silicon die, referred to as dark silicon. This paper presents a reconfigurable architecture to enable effective fine-grained power gating of unused Logic Blocks (LBs) in FPGAs. In the proposed architecture, the traditional soft logic is replaced with Mega Cells (MCs), each consists of a set of complementary Generic Reconfigurable Hard Logic (GRHL) and a conventional Look-Up Table (LUT). Both GRHL cells and LUTs can be power gated and turned off by controlling configuration bits. In the proposed MC, only one cell is active and the others are turned off. Experimental results on MCNC benchmark suite reveal that the proposed architecture reduces the critical path delay, power, and Power Delay Product (PDP) of LBs up to 5.3%, 30.4%, and 28.8% as compared to the equivalent LUT-based architecture
  5. Keywords:
  6. Architecture ; Reconfigurable architectures ; Reconfigurable hardware ; Silicon ; Table lookup ; Benchmark suites ; CMOS transistors ; Critical path delays ; Fine-grained power gating ; Power delay product ; Proposed architectures ; Reconfigurable ; Transistor density ; Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA)
  7. Source: Conference Digest - 24th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications, FPL 2014 ; Sept , 2014 , pp. 1 - 6 ; ISBN: 9783000446450
  8. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6927504&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6927504