A low cost system for self measurements of power consumption in field programmable gate arrays

Abstract

This paper presents a specific system to measure power consumption in FPGAs. It is based on a current-frequency conversion block. This tool allows an application running inside the FPGA to know its own consumption in real time. The proposed system includes a small external circuit that performs current-to-frequency conversion and an associated VHDL core designed to register the power consumption inside the FPGA. The external circuit is built with off-the-shelf low-cost components and has low power consumption, the VHDL core uses very few on-chip resources. The complete system has an error lower than 1% in the FPGA power consumption measurement. As it can be triggered by internal complex conditions, it makes it possible to obtain detailed power consumption profiles of FPGA designs using a very simple procedure.