A general post-processing approach to leakage current reduction in SRAM-based FPGAs

A negative effect of ever-shrinking supply and threshold voltages is the larger percentage of total power consumption that comes from leakage current. Several techniques have been developed to help reduce leakage in SRAM-based memory, in which the percent leakage power is especially acute. SRAM-based field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) pose similar leakage problems, but their structure and function require different solutions. This paper introduces a low complexity post-processing approach to reducing FPGA leakage current by ground-gating off SRAM cells that are unused in a particular device configuration. The approach is general enough to apply to any device configuration, and results reveal that the significant leakage current reduction can be achieved with no delay penalty and acceptable area overhead.