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

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 temperatureaware design is needed.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Giacomo Paci, Paul Marchal, Francesco Poletti, Luca Benini
• Keywords: DATE 2006, Hardware, Hot Spots, Low-power Embedded Systems, Process Technology Generation