VolTune: A Fine-Grained Runtime Voltage Control Architecture for FPGA Systems
Akram Ben Ahmed, Takahiro Hirofuchi, Takaaki Fukai

TL;DR
VolTune introduces an open-source FPGA runtime voltage control system that dynamically adjusts supply voltages, significantly reducing power consumption while maintaining performance and reliability.
Contribution
It presents a novel FPGA-integrated architecture for runtime voltage tuning with hardware and software control paths, enabling energy-efficient operation.
Findings
Achieves 29.3% power reduction at 10 Gbps with BER up to 10^-6.
End-to-end voltage transition latency of 2.3 ms.
Controller adds less than 2% static power and FPGA resource overhead.
Abstract
The rapid emergence of edge computing platforms and large-scale data centers has made power efficiency a primary design constraint, particularly for data-intensive and AI-driven workloads. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly adopted due to their flexibility and potential for energy-efficient acceleration. However, FPGA supply voltages are typically fixed at design time using conservative margins, limiting the ability to adapt power consumption to runtime conditions. This paper presents VolTune, an open-source runtime voltage control architecture that enables runtime tuning of FPGA supply voltages through FPGA-integrated control logic that abstracts low-level PMBus operations. VolTune provides both hardware-based and software-based control paths, allowing designers to balance deterministic low-latency operation against programmability. In the presented prototype,…
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