Modelling the Power and Energy Consumption of NIOS II Softcores on FPGA

This paper discusses the consumption of NIOS I embedded processors on different FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) platforms. Two FPGA embedded platform have been studied (based on the Cyclone III LS and Aria II GX from ALTERA). Power and energy consumption have been measured using an automated test bench. From these measurements, parameters with the greatest influence on the power and energy consumption are identified, and power and energy models are developed. Those models will be included in high level tools for early design space exploration. They exhibit a relatively low error(3% in average). They were validated against measurements on a video analysis application. The works which are presented here have been undertaken in the frame of the Open-PEOPLE research project, which goal is to provide a platform dedicated to power and energy measurement, estimation and optimization for complete embedded systems.