Measuring power consumption of MAX10 Eval Board

Question

Hi,
I'm opening a new post since I didn't get any answers to my last reply in this post (How can I measure power consumption on MAX10 Eval Board? ).
I'm trying to study power consumption of a MAX10 (10M50F484), and I am using the Evaluation Kit. The MAX 10 FPGA 10M50 Evaluation Kit User Guide says in the first section that this kit enables user to "Measure FPGA power (VCC_CORE)", but I can't find how to do so. 
The link given here is unfortunately dedicated to a 10M08 device, and I can't follow the tutorial on my board (10M50). Though I understand that I should use the Test Pads on the board, the ones I can use on mine seem to be linked to GND (as you can see in the picture attached).

Could you help me find where to put the multimeter on the board if I want to measure the current drawn for the CORE voltage? If you have documentation to explain what each Test Pad is corresponding to or a tutorial to follow, that would be very useful!

Thanks

sstrell · Answer

I presume this is the schematic for your board:
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/support/boards-kits/max10_dk_schematic_revC_pcb.pdf

I don't know what you want to look at, but shouldn't that tell you what you need?
And if you need the PCB layout, it's here with the other documents for this kit:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/products/boards_and_kits/dev-kits/altera/max-10-fpga-development-kit.html

ch_briand · Answer

Thank you for the help, but actually this is not my board. What you're talking about is the Development Kit, and I'm working on the Evaluation Kit (Intel MAX 10 FPGA 10M50 Evaluation Kit).I have the schematic for my board: MAX10_10M50_EVAL_A1_2 (intel.com)
I want to compare several boards and find the most energy efficient one. To obtain the power consumption, I need to measure a voltage and a current. The User Guide of the board says that I should be able to measure VCC_CORE (not explaining how though).
What I don't understand is how I can measure both of these values (especially the current) if the only way to access the circuit is those test pads?

sstrell · Answer

If you need that level of power measurement, in the past I'd lift pins and put in wire coils.  For overall power use, you of course would put an ammeter on the power going in.
I don't know what that bullet point is trying to say, but you still need to use traditional methods for power measurement.
You could also use the Power Analyzer in Quartus if you've created a test design.

ch_briand · Answer

I'm afraid I can't lift pins as you propose, and I also don't want to measure the whole board consumption, only the consumption of the FPGA. Thank you for your help but even if I wanted to lift pins, since I have no information on what current or voltage to measure, I wouldn't know for sure that I'd be measuring the right thing. I'm starting to believe that the bullet point was an unfortunate copy-paste from the Dev Kit documentation.
Could someone from Intel give me more information about it or admit that this board isn't made for power consumption measurement?

amint_intel · Answer

Hello,

Have you tried the Power Analyzer method as suggested?

Thanks.

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Measuring power consumption of MAX10 Eval Board

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