Power Analysis of Low Power Virtex 6 FPGA based Communication FloSwitch Design

Flosolver designed and developed Mk 8 parallel super computer with computing power of 10 TFLOPS. Mk8 used 1024 processor as processing elements (PE’s). Communication device called FloSwitch used for Data transfer across the processing elements [1]. Communication speed, power utilization and flexibility in the interconnectivity have always scope of improvement. In this report Power section has been addressed to improve further by bringing down the total power in the FloSwitch design. Theoretical analysis has been done to reduce FloSwitch power as a whole. Major change in the design is to replace external DPM with internal memory of FPGA (BLOCK RAM). Power analysis has been done on low power Virtex 6 FPGA and Virtex 5 FPGA using Xilinx power estimator (XPE) and power calculation for the entire board. FPGA’s power utilization has been analyzed in detail and overall board power calculations have been done. Comparative analysis results give the considerable power reduction for the new design.