Exploring "temperature-aware" design in low-power MPSoCs

  • Authors:
  • G. Paci;P. Marchal;F. Poletti;L. Benini

  • Affiliations:
  • DEIS, U. Bologna;IMEC;DEIS, U. Bologna;DEIS, U. Bologna

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe: Proceedings
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The power density inside high performance systems continues to rise with every process technology generation, thereby increasing the operating temperature and creating "hot spots" on the die. As a result, the performance, reliability and power consumption of the system degrade. To avoid these "hot spots", "temperature-aware" design has become a must. For low-power embedded systems though, it is not clear whether similar thermal problems occur. These systems have very different characteristics from the high performance ones: they consume hundred times less power, they are based on a multi-processor architecture with lots of embedded memory and rely on cheap packaging solutions. In this paper, we investigate the need for temperature-aware design in a low-power systems-on-a-chip and provide guidlines to delimit the conditions for which temperature-aware design is needed.