The Impact of Pipelining on Energy per Operation in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

This paper investigates experimentally the quantitative impact of pipelining on energy per operation for two representative FPGA devices: a 0.13μm CMOS high density/high speed FPGA (Altera Stratix EP1S40), and a 0.18μm CMOS low-cost FPGA (Xilinx XC2S200). The results are obtained by both measurements and execution of vendor-supplied tools for power estimation. It is found that pipelining can reduce the amount of energy per operation by between 40% and 90%. Further reduction in energy consumption can be achieved by power-aware clustering, although the effect becomes less pronounced for circuits with a large number of pipeline stages.