LEGaTO researcher presents FPGA undervolting invited talk at IOLTS 2019

LEGaTO researcher and coordinator Osman Unsal gave a talk titled, “FPGAs Undervolting” at the 25th IEEE International Symposium on On-Line Testing and Robust System Design (IOLTS 2019) in Rhodes Island, Greece on 1-3 July, 2019.

The talk was presented at the Emerging Trends in Hardware Margins and Energy-Efficiency session on July 1 at 15:45-16:45, as part of a joint invited paper by the leading CPU-GPU-FPGA undervolting experts. His talk focused on how to improve the energy-efficiency of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). An effective approach is undervolting which can directly deliver an order of magnitude static and dynamic power savings. However, aggressive undervolting, without accompanying frequency scaling leads to timing related faults, potentially undermining the power savings. Understanding the behavior of these faults and efficiently mitigating them can deliver further power and energy savings in low-voltage designs. In his presentation, Osman described how his team conducted a detailed analysis of undervolting FPGA on-chip memories (BRAMs). Through experimental analysis, they found that lowering the supply voltage until a certain conservative level, V min does not introduce any observable fault.

IOLTS is an established forum for presenting novel ideas and experimental data on these areas of on-line testing techniques, and more generally to design for robustness in modern electronic systems. The Symposium is sponsored by the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) and the 2019 edition is organized by the IEEE Computer Society Test Technology Technical Council, the University of Athens, and the TIMA Laboratory.

View the presentation here.