Design of power-aware FPGA fabrics

We present two techniques to reduce the power consumption in FPGAs. The first technique uses two supply voltages: timing-critical paths run on normal Vdd, while the non-critical ones save power by using a lower Vdd. Our programmable dual-Vdd architectures and Vdd assignment algorithms provide an average power saving of 61% across the MCNC benchmarks. The second technique targets applications where configuration time is crucial. It uses Asymmetric SRAM (ASRAM) (instead of high-Vt SRAM) cells to implement the configuration memory. Our bit-inversion algorithm further reduces leakage by increasing the number of ASRAM cells that are in their preferred state.