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Altera_Forum
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13 years ago

Using output pins to heat up CycloneIII

Hi everyone, I need to programmatically change the core temperature of a CycloneIII FPGA, in order to test the functionality of my IP core. I already do this using the dynamic power dissipation...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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13 years ago

OK point, I'm not doing simple tests on my IP core but for a number of (strange) reasons I want to keep the Tj stable and compensate the ambient temperature variations.

Since variations in Tj causes variations in propagation delays (that basically I need to keep stable) I monitor the FPGA temperature using a ring oscillator and through a PI controller I close the loop. The subject of this post is the actuator.

As I previously said, I have already built one of this but in order to get significant temperature changes I need to use a lot of gates and this cause a lot of noise in chip.

I know, this is not the conventional use of FPGA, but it work quite well and it is compact and cheaper than others solutions:D.