WHAT'S NEW @ IEEE IN CIRCUITS March 2006

FPGAs POPULARITY DEPENDANT ON POWER
Power consumption was a hot topic at February's 2006 FPGA, most notably the difference between FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) and ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits). Many researchers argued that ASICs are more practical than FPGAs, but not everyone agreed. One presenter, Tim Tuan of Xilinx Inc., said his company is building a low-power architecture based on the company's Spartan 3 fabric that will apply such optimizations as voltage scaling, power gating, low-leakage configuration memory and sleep mode. This Pika architecture is said to produce 46 percent less active power and 99 percent less standby power than the baseline Spartan 3. Pika claims to lessen the problem of dissipating standby power milliamps, bringing FPGAs into an acceptable range for mobile, battery-powered products. Despite the arguments that these advancements will improve the FPGAs marketability, other researchers were not so sure, arguing that despite the scaling, FPGAs are still 20 times more power-hungry than ASICs. For more on this and other topics discussed at the conference, visit: http://www.powermanagementdesignline.com/news/181400903