Intel® FPGA Power and Thermal Calculator User Guide

ID 683445
Date 3/28/2022
Public

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Document Table of Contents

1. Overview of the Intel® FPGA Power and Thermal Calculator

Updated for:
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Suite 22.1
This user guide describes the Intel® FPGA Power and Thermal Calculator (PTC). The current version of the Intel® FPGA PTC supports Intel® Agilex™ and Intel® Stratix® 10 devices.

This tool does not support older devices such as the Intel® Arria® 10 and Intel® Cyclone® 10 families; use the corresponding Early Power Estimator if you are working with those devices.

This user guide provides guidelines for using the Intel® FPGA PTC, and details about thermal parameters and the factors contributing to FPGA power consumption.

You can calculate FPGA power consumption using the Intel® FPGA PTC, and for more accurate power estimation, use the Power Analyzer in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software. Intel recommends that you switch from the Intel® FPGA PTC to the Power Analyzer once your design is available. The Power Analyzer produces more accurate results because it has more detailed information about your design, including routing and configuration information about each of the resources in your design.

You should treat the Intel® FPGA PTC results as an estimate of power, not as a specification. You must verify the actual power consumption during device operation, because the information is sensitive to the actual device and design input signals. See the appendix Measuring Static Power for information on how to measure device static power in a way that correlates with the way that Intel® FPGA PTC reports static power.

The features of the Intel® FPGA PTC include:
  • The ability to estimate the power consumption of your design before creating the design or during the design process.
  • The ability to import device resource information from the Intel® Quartus® Prime software using the .qptc file generated with the Intel® Quartus® Prime software.
  • The ability to determine preliminary thermal assessments of your design.