Reducing the Static Energy Consumption using Heterogeneous Multi-FPGU System

Multi-FPGA systems are an alternative to the reconfiguration limitation of a single FPGA, when a number of real-time tasks arrive together and must be scheduled and executed before a specified deadline. Energy consumption, consisting of static and dynamic, is an important factor in such systems, especially when used as battery powered applications. In this paper, heterogeneous multi-FPGA system is proposed to reduce the static energy consumption of a multi-FPGA system. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is used to schedule the real-time tasks that periodically enter the system. The number of these tasks, as the case of many applications, supposed to be different from one period to another. The consumption energy is estimated for both the homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. Results show that the heterogeneous system saves 6.44 percent of energy, compared with the homogeneous system. If the number of tasks, and so the required number of blocks are small, this amount could be much higher.