Most power efficient FPGA?

P

Peter S

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Hi, I have been away from in-depth FPGA development for maybe a decade!
I am looking to design an embedded camera product where power use is key. I'd like to use an FPGA for some video manipulation not much.
I used to only use Altera FPGAs, so I know their architecture well enough. It looks like the Cyclone 10 LP is the lowest-power device they have, and their LE structure looks the same as when I last worked with Altera.
What is the most efficient Xilinx family? I don't need embedded hard CPU, transceiver I/O, or anything but DSP hard blocks and basic logic.
Using Altera's Early Power Estimator, it looks like I can get to 600 mW using 1.0 V_ccint on Cyclone 10 with about 90% of logic (15,000 LUTs and registers), block RAM (50 M9K's) and DSPs (100 9x9's).
Then I started using Xilinx's power estimator but got a bit confused because I don't know how to map the same resource usage on to a Xilinx device.
Which Xilinx parts are the most power-efficient? The Zync Ultrascale+, Zync 7000, or Artix-7?

Thanks!
Peter
 
Peter,

The ICE40 family from Lattice is, as far as I know, the FPGA with the most focus on low power. They are very small (the largest model only has 8 thousand LUTs) and don't have multipliers and stuff like that.

http://www.latticesemi.com/Products/FPGAandCPLD/iCE40

Beyond low power, there has been recently a lot of interest in these chips because they have been reversed engineered allowing a complete open source tool chain to be made compatible with them.

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

The devices you mentioned are not as efficient but they do allow far larger designs.

-- Jecel
 
Am Dienstag, 13. Februar 2018 00:51:07 UTC+1 schrieb Peter S:
> What is the most efficient Xilinx family? I don't need embedded hard CPU, transceiver I/O, or anything but DSP hard blocks and basic logic.

Why are you sticking to Xilinx now when you need low power? Maybe this answer helps also to exclude some Xilinx devices.

You should also check Microsemi FPGA. They tend to be far smaller and providing less performance for high end than Xilinx and Altera, but have interessting power figures.
As far as I know the lattice ICE40 has problems reaching similar low power performance than Igloo. But I never did a real case study to verify this statement.

bye Thomas
 

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