hoangt/hpowerestimator

Hierarchical FPGA Power Estimator

HPowerEstimator

FPGA is a promising hardware accelerator in modern high-performance computing systems, e.g. cloud computing, big-data processing, etc. In such a system, power is a key factor of the design requiring thermal and energy-saving considerations. Modern power estimators for FPGA either support specific hardware provided by vendors or contain power models for certain types of conventional FPGA architectures. However, with technology advancement, novel FPGA of versatile architectures are introduced to further augment current FPGA architecture at various aspects, such as emerging FPGA with non-volatile memory, nanowire interconnection of reconfigurable array, etc. To evaluate the power consumption of various FPGA designs, the power estimator has to be made more flexible and extendable for supporting new devices and architectures. We introduced a novel power estimator with hierarchical library supporting power models at different levels, e.g. novel circuit of components, emerging memory devices, architecture of time-multiplexing fashion, etc. The power estimator also supports coarse-grain or fine-grain power estimation defined by users for achieving complexity-accuracy trade-off. Simulation results of benchmarks of our power estimator against commercial one demonstrate accuracy of our tool. Meanwhile, we showed two examples of power estimation, RRAM FPGA and partial reconfigurable FPGA, which have novel memory device and unconventional operation, respectively. Our tool demonstrates flexibility to well support, but not limited to, the new designs.