Researchers at the Delft University of Technology wanted to use FPGAs at cryogenic temperatures down around 4 degrees Kelvin. They knew from previous research that many FPGAs that use submicron fabrication technology actually work pretty well at those temperatures. It is the other components that misbehave — in particular, capacitors and voltage regulators. They worked out an interesting strategy to get around this problem.
The common solution is to move the power supply away from the FPGA and out of the cold environment. The problem is, that means long wires and fluctuating current demands will cause a variable voltage drop at the end of the long wire. The traditional answer to that problem is to have the remote regulator sense the voltage close to the load. This works because the current going through the sense wires is a small fraction of the load current and should be relatively constant. The Delft team took a different approach because they found sensing power supplies reacted too slowly: they created an FPGA design that draws nearly the same current no matter what it is doing.
