Measure Power Consumption of Designed system on an Altera DE1 Board

Question

I am designing a processor using an Altera DE1 kit.

I will be running test bench to stress the processor.

I want to know if there is any way to measure only the power consumption of my design and neglecting the other power dissipation caused by the DE1 board.

TIA for the answer.

Answer 1

You should be able to replace the 0-Ohm resistor R29 by a shunt resistor and measure the core current of the fpga through that. It's right in series with VCCINT so it should reflect only the current used by the fpga logic.

There's also R30 in series with VCCIO, if you want to include IO power consumption as well.

The resistor names are from this schematic (the only one I could find so far): http://d1.amobbs.com/bbs_upload782111/files_33/ourdev_586508CWZW3R.pdf

Answer 2

Measure power at an idle state. The idle state can be many things. This needs to be decided by you:

• The board operating when the FPGA is not programmed (no bitstream loaded).

• FPGA loaded, but you hold down the reset for the logic.

• Place the FPGA in some kind of suspended state (sleep mode).

Now that you have your reference power measurement, measure the power with your design running fully. Subtract one from the other, and you will have a result which is close to what you are searching for (The board may consume differently, at each idle state, than it would have been when running normally with your design).