Title: Exploring temperature-aware design in low-power MPSoCs

Authors: Giacomo Paci, Francesco Poletti, Luca Benini, Paul Marchal

Addresses: DEIS – Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, University of Bologna, Italy. ' DEIS – Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, University of Bologna, Italy. ' DEIS – Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, University of Bologna, Italy. ' IMEC – Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center, Leuven, Belgium

Abstract: The power density in 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: e.g., they consume 100 times less power. Therefore, we provide in this paper guidelines to delimit the conditions for which temperature-aware design is needed.

Keywords: MPSoC; thermal modelling; low power processors; hot spots; temperature aware design; silicon bulk technology; power density; embedded systems; multiprocessor system-on-a-chip.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2007.016032

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2007 Vol.3 No.1/2, pp.43 - 51

Published online: 02 Dec 2007 *

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