Power estimations vs. power measurements in Cyclone III devices

Abstract

This paper presents experimental measurements of power consumption for core logic of a 65-nm Cyclone III FPGA and its comparison with the value predicted by the power estimation tool. The laboratory work is described, including the measurement setup, the benchmark circuits, and the CAD flows utilized to obtain power estimations. The selected circuits used as benchmarks were different type of multipliers implemented in LUTs and in embedded blocks both with or without pipelining stages. Three type of results are presented: first, the error between power measurements and power estimations; second, the power savings by using pipeline stages, and third, the quantification of power savings by using embedded blocks.