Power consumption is a critical issue in all products and particularly in portable devices. Creating power budgets based solely on estimations of load and switching frequencies is somewhat of a black art, and at best only vaguely accurate. There are just too many variables involved.
With FPGA designs it’s essential to be able to accurately determine the power drawn to check that the devices, and your embedded design, are suitable – especially for battery-powered applications, for example. With the Altium Innovation Station – the combination of Altium Designer and the Desktop NanoBoard – you can now comprehensively measure and graph the power consumed by your design in real time.
Altium Designer and the Desktop NanoBoard now include the new Power Monitoring optimization tool to help you maximize power efficiency. On-board current sensing circuitry in the *NanoBoard lets you analyze and monitor power consumption in your design, and make direct comparisons between different devices and circuit configurations.
With the Altium Innovation Station, the power circuits to each of the NanoBoard’s daughter board, peripheral board, and user board subsystems can be individually monitored and graphed, allowing you to see the effect that design and frequency changes have on your overall power budget.
The Power Monitor panel is accessed through Altium Designer’s Instrument Rack: in the NanoBoard Controllers panel, click the Show Panel button in the Power Monitor section. Values can also be graphed to show the power consumption over time for a particular hardware configuration and design.
* Note that the power monitoring functionality is only available on the recently-released NB2DSK01.08 and later NanoBoards.
