Preliminary Study on the Impact of Place and Route Strategy on FPGA Electromagnetic Emission

Dense integration and high operating frequencies associated with increased number of I/O buffers of FPGAs are factors contributing to electromagnetic emission (EME) increase. Consequently the radiation issue that used to be discussed at PCB level has shifted to component level. Thus it is of high interest and challenging to investigate chip electromagnetic performance. This paper presents a preliminary analysis about the impact of the placement and routing (P&R) process of logic inside the FPGA on the chip EME level. With this purpose, a softcore processor was placed and routed based on three different strategies in the configurable logic block (CLB) array of a commercial FPGA and executed an application code running over an operating system (OS). Three experiments based on far- and near-field emission measurements have been performed.-The obtained results indicate that the EME level can be affected up to 21.8% by the way the processor is placed and routed inside the FPGA.