Exploring temperature-aware design in low-power MPSoCs

: 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: 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 guidelines to delimit the conditions for which temperature-aware design is needed.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJES
• Authors: Giacomo Paci, Francesco Poletti, Luca Benini, Paul Marchal
• Keywords: IJES 2007, Low-power Embedded Systems, Power Density, Process Technology Generation