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I'm trying to measure the power consumption of my (Altera DE10-Nano) board after programming it with a compiled OpenCL kernel, to estimate the efficiency of my algorithm. There is already some power estimator software from altera to estimate the power consumption in the design time but depending on an HDL. Is there any way to measure the power consumption at run time?

Majd Addin
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    You put am amp-meter in the supply wire. – Oldfart May 14 '18 at 15:19
  • but the board contains not only an FPGA but also an ARM processor (hps) in addition to different peripherals (which could be not significant in compare to the processor) – Majd Addin May 14 '18 at 19:12
  • Then you have to do multiple measurements. With and without the FPGA operating. – Oldfart May 14 '18 at 19:36
  • would the measurement represent the power consumption of the processor and peripherals only when FPGA not operating, or would it represent the processor and peripherals + static power of the FPGA ?. so the difference between two measurement would be only the dynamic power of the FPGA ? many thanks – Majd Addin May 14 '18 at 21:28

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Is there any way to measure the power consumption at run time?

No, DE10-Nano boards seems to have no any builtin power meters for run time. Some larger boards may have some. You may use external power meter.

Do you have any information on power DC-DC converter used on the board of DE10-Nano? I can't identify it in photos 1 and 2 (from https://rocketboards.org/foswiki/Documentation/DE10NanoDevelopmentBoard) or in manual.

There is some "Power Circuit" in the Brief (http://www.innovatefpga.com/portal/assets/pdf/DE10_Nano_Product_Brief.pdf) to convert input 5V voltage into set of 9.0 3.3 2.5 1.8 1.5 1.2. 1.1 0.75 volts. Some power circuits may have builtin Ammeter (Ampere Meter) or Wattmeter.

If board has DC-DC with ammeter or wattmeter, and it has some kind of external control/monitoring interface like I2C, you can try to connect to it and read ampere or watt consumption.

If board has no meters in DC-DC chips/circuits, you should measure power consumption manually on 5V input cable or even on wall socket of plug adapter. There are some solutions for 5V usb (for example, adafruit's charge doctor with some converter from usb to barrel connector) and for 110/220V (wattmeters, but they may have low resolution for 10 Watt devices like DE10-nano). Or even running your load for some long time and using separate electricity meter for the device (still manually).

Cyclone V chips have no declared power meters built into them: https://www.altera.com/en_US/pdfs/literature/hb/cyclone-v/cv_51001.pdf (and it is harder to measure power from inside the chip which has several low-voltage power domains with tight voltage requirements and high amperes).

For other boards altera shows very complex power supply network on the board - https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/pdfs/literature/an/an734.pdf page 8 (or https://www.altera.com/products/power/resource-center.html#powering_cyclone_v), with 2A and 3A max consumption for many voltages.

Other board may have some monitoring connected to FPGA or HPS: https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/pdfs/literature/an/an734.pdf page 12 - "Appendix: Power Measurement Techniques for Cyclone V SoC Dev Kit" describes i2c/pmbus/smbus interface to power monitoring of two LTC2978A DC-DC converters for Cyclone V SoC Dev Kit board (DK-DEV-5CSXC6N, around $1800)

osgx
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