AN 944: Thermal Modeling for Intel® Agilex™ FPGAs with the Intel® FPGA Power and Thermal Calculator

ID 683810
Date 3/29/2021
Public

5.1. Thermal Parameter Dependencies and Accuracy

The Intel® Agilex™ FPGA thermal design parameters are unique for every project. Thermal design parameters are mainly determined by the power, local power density, and power ratio of dies. Any change to the design requires design information to be updated accordingly in the Intel® FPGA Power and Thermal Calculator (PTC). That is, a set of thermal parameters calculated early in the project, may no longer be valid if the FPGA utilization is changed later.

At the beginning of the project, the only power and thermal parameter calculations possible are those performed in the standalone PTC without using an actual RTL design. However, when the RTL design becomes available, you should run the PTC integrated within the Intel® Quartus® Prime software, and recalculate the power and other thermal parameters with the actual RTL design. Calculations in the integrated version of the PTC are based on actual routings inside the core fabric, and are more accurate.