Compact Thermal Modeling for Temperature Aware Design

Thermal design in sub-100nm technologies has become one of the major challenges to the CAD community. Thermal effects on design aspects such as performance, power and reliability have to be thoroughly and seriously considered during the entire design flow in order to achieve faster design convergence and optimal design.
This paper expands the discussion in our conference paper [8]. We first introduce the idea of temperature-aware design. We then propose a compact thermal model which can be integrated with modern CAD tools to achieve a temperature-aware design methodology. Finally, we use the compact thermal model in a case study of microprocessor design to show the importance of using temperature as a guideline for the design. The results from our thermal model show that a temperature- aware design approach can provide more accurate estimations, and therefore better decisions and faster design convergence.

Huang, Wei, Mircea Stan, Kevin Skadron, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Shougata Ghosh, and Sivakumar Velusamy. "Compact Thermal Modeling for Temperature Aware Design." University of Virginia Dept. of Computer Science Tech Report (2004).