GreenFPGA: Evaluating FPGAs as Environmentally Sustainable Computing Solutions

TL;DR

This paper introduces GreenFPGA, a tool for estimating the carbon footprint of FPGAs, demonstrating their potential as environmentally sustainable hardware solutions compared to ASICs, especially for low-volume or short-term applications.

Contribution

The paper presents GreenFPGA, a novel tool for comprehensive CFP estimation of FPGAs, and evaluates their sustainability advantages over ASICs in various scenarios.

Findings

FPGAs generally have lower CFP than ASICs for low-volume applications.

Reconfigurability of FPGAs can lead to ecological benefits outweighing costs.

FPGAs are more sustainable for short application lifespans.

Abstract

Growing global concerns about climate change highlight the need for environmentally sustainable computing. The ecological impact of computing, including operational and embodied, is a key consideration. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) stand out as promising sustainable computing platforms due to their reconfigurability across various applications. This paper introduces GreenFPGA, a tool estimating the total carbon footprint (CFP) of FPGAs over their lifespan, considering design, manufacturing, reconfigurability (reuse), operation, disposal, and recycling. Using GreenFPGA, the paper evaluates scenarios where the ecological benefits of FPGA reconfigurability outweigh operational and embodied carbon costs, positioning FPGAs as a environmentally sustainable choice for hardware acceleration compared to Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). Experimental results show that FPGAs have lower CFP than ASICs, particularly for multiple distinct, low-volume applications, or short application lifespans.