Power has become a major factor for various applications in today's consumer-dominated market. Both ASIC and FPGA methodologies focus on developing solutions to cope with the power dissipation challenge. Apparently, FPGAs have inherently power consumption issues, which lead to endless debating on the right balance between power reduction and the trade-offs it brings to field programmable architecture.
Besides meeting the component operating conditions, achieving the system power budget is of significant importance as it carries three main consequences – system reliability, adherence to standards and system level cost. Lower power consumption enables the use of lower-cost power supplies, fewer power supply components as well as simpler PCB design. Since power consumption is directly related to heat dissipation, lower-power enables less expensive thermal management solutions. Lower-power can mean eliminating the need for an expensive heat sink with special airflow management. In the deep-submicron design environment, the issue of leakage or static power has become critical and its severeness is clear in FPGA's implementations.
Structured ASICs hold a significant power advantage over FPGAs and can be offered in considerably lower unit-price. This paper presents a case-study of a video application, where eASIC's Nextreme devices are compared to FPGAs, demonstrating how the unique Structured ASIC architecture consumed 1/10 of the power consumed by the FPGAs.
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Dr. Herman Schmit
Technology Architect
eASIC
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Dr. Herman Schmit has a perfect combination of impressive academic credentials together with broad industry experience. Prior to joining eASIC, Dr. Schmit was the Chief Hardware Architect at Tabula Inc, (Santa Clara), a stealth-mode chip start-up. Before Tabula, Dr. Schmit was Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published more than 40 technical articles in leading journals and conference proceedings, was the general chair of the International Symposium on FPGAs in 2005, and has been awarded 6 patents in the areas of Integrated Circuits and Programmable Gate Arrays. He was a coauthor on the first academic papers on the Structured ASIC concept.
Dr. Schmit received his B.S.E. in Computer Science Engineering from University of Pennsylvania in 1987, and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. |
