TAPHS: thermal-aware unified physical-level and high-level synthesis

Thermal effects are becoming increasingly important during integrated circuit design. Thermal characteristics influence reliability, power consumption, cooling costs, and performance. It is necessary to consider thermal effects during all levels of the design process, from the architectural level to the physical level. However, design-time temperature prediction requires access to block placement, wire models, power profile, and a chip-package thermal model. Thermal-aware design and synthesis necessarily couple architectural-level design decisions (e.g., scheduling) with physical design (e.g., floorplanning) and modeling (e.g., wire and thermal modeling). This article proposes an efficient and accurate thermal-aware floorplanning high-level synthesis system that makes use of integrated highlevel and physical-level thermal optimization techniques. Voltage islands are automatically generated via novel slack distribution and voltage partitioning algorithms in order to reduce the design�...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ASPDAC
• Authors: Zhenyu (Peter) Gu, Yonghong Yang, Jia Wang, Robert P. Dick, Li Shang
• Keywords: ASPDAC 2006, Hardware, Peak Temperature, Power Consumption, Thermal