Accurate power measurement technique for digital systems using independent component analysis

Abstract

Analog-to-digital (ADC) converters are the most direct and accurate method of power measurement. However it is impractical to instrument ADCs for large number of circuits in a digital system to measure power. In this paper, we present a high resolution digital power measurement technique that is scalable, uses lower power, and is less invasive than ADCs. The core concepts of this new technique has been demonstrated using an evaluation design on FPGA platform. Our latest design can simultaneously monitor 350 different instrumentation points on FPGA circuits and on-board components at 128 kS/sec for each point. The calculated total power differs from those acquired using low noise ADC by less than 3%. Furthermore, an offline data analysis indicates that our method is resilient to instrumentation errors and noise.