Henry Y. Lui

Power estimation and thermal budgeting methodology for FPGAs

The method used for power estimation and thermal budgeting on an FPGA product line, fabricated using 90 nm technology, is described in this paper. It addresses the reasons why state-of-the-art processes create power concerns on FPGAs, and describes methodologies that provide more relevant power and junction temperature estimations. Finally it suggests what can be done to improve the power budget and to balance the trade-offs between power and performance.

Architecture and methodology of a SoPC with 3.25Gbps CDR based SERDES and 1Gbps dynamic phase alignment

The SoPC (system on a programmable chip) aspects of the Stratix GX/spl trade/ FPGA with 3.125 Gbps SERDES are described. The FPGA was fabricated on a 0.13 /spl mu/m, 9-layer metal process. The 16 high-speed serial transceiver channels with clock data recovery (CDR) provides 622-Megabits per second (Mbps) to 3.125-Gbps full-duplex transceiver operation per channel. Another challenge described is the implementation of 39 source-synchronous channels at 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, utilizing dynamic phase alignment (DPA). The implementation and integration of the FPGA logic array (with its own hard IP) with the CDR and DPA channels involved grappling with SoC design issues and methodologies.