Sundance SMT358 - Manual (Page 7)

Version 2.5 Page 7 of 25 SMT358 User Manual
SMT358 Power consumption Considerations
The SMT358 power consumption is mostly dependant on the Virtex fitted and its
usage.
When using a SMT3581000E, sufficient cooling is provided on-board for the voltage
regulator and for the Virtex 1000E, nevertheless a correct airflow MUST prevail in
your PC.
The larger and the faster the Virtex FPGA design is, the higher the Virtex power
consumption is.
For example, considering a shift register using 50% of the LUTs of a Virtex 1000E at
100 Mhz with data toggling at every clock cycle will have the effect of drawing more
current than the voltage regulator can provide and will make the voltage regulator fail
(safely) and the FPGA will loose its configuration.
Therefore, we advice customers to use Xilinx power estimator to determine the worst-
case power consumption of their design AND to consult.
The Excel program can be found at:
http://support.xilinx.com/support/techsup/powerest/virtex_power_estimator_v15.xls
The user guide on how to use this program can be found at:
http://support.xilinx.com/xapp/xapp152.pdf