Energy consumption of processors in different FPGA platforms

• Grant number: 13/06844-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2013
• End date: December 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computer Systems
• Principal Investigator: Rodolfo Jardim de Azevedo
• Grantee: Jéssica Tavares Heffernan
• Host Institution: Instituto de Computação (IC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Emulation, prototyping and validation stages have become indispensable in the cycle of a project, as a consequence of the increasing complexity of digital systems. Energy consumption appears more and more as one of the main concerns about the system design. acSynth is a framework developed by Guedes et al [1] for energy analysis of programs running on MIPS-I or SPARCv8 processors. The analysis of the results obtained in the quoted work shows differences among energy estimates for a same processor, when these came from simulations on different platforms. Thus, the present work aims to highlight the differences in energy consumption for different technologies. To accomplish that, further testing will be performed for Plasma and Leon3 processors using, however, families of Xilinx and Altera FPGAs other than those already used, as shown in table 3. Tables of consumption of each instruction obtained for the platforms will be stored in a database and can be reused in order to reduce the time of future simulations. The estimates will be evaluated for different operating frequencies in order to develop a model of dependence for each pair processor-platform, as suggested in [2]. This model avoids the need to perform new simulations to obtain energy consumption at a different frequency, for a pair already simulated. The tool acRTL, developed by Goto et al [3] for synthesis of processors descripted in ArchC ADL, will be integrated into the acSynth flow for simulations of Plasma on a FPGA Stratix, to obtain an analysis of the feasibility of using this tool. (AU)