The board management controller monitors and manages thermal and power events on the Intel® FPGA PAC. When the board or FPGA is overheating or drawing excessive current, the board management controller shuts down the FPGA power for protection. Subsequently, it also brings down the PCIe link which may cause an unexpected system crash.

Refer to Auto-Shutdown for more details about the criteria that triggers board shutdown. In normal cases, the FPGA temperature and power are by far the leading cause of shutdown. To minimize downtime and ensure system stability, Intel recommends that the total board power does not go beyond 66 W and FPGA power does not go beyond 45 W.

Individual components and board assemblies have power variability. Therefore, the nominal values are lower than the limits to ensure that the board does not experience a random shutdown in a system with varying workloads and inlet temperatures.

The total board power varies depending on your Accelerator Functional Unit (AFU) design (amount and frequency of logic toggling), inlet temperature, system temperature and airflow of the target slot for the Intel® FPGA PAC. To manage this variability, Intel recommends you meet this power specification to prevent power shutdown by the Board Management Controller.