Thermal-Aware Design

Seda Ogrenci Memik, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

Abstract: Steady miniaturization and large-scale integration lead to increasing power densities. As a result, on-chip temperatures are rising steadily as technology is scaling down. Making matters worse, power management techniques such as clock gating, voltage islands, and power gating may lead to drastic temporal and spatial variations of chip temperatures. As a result, temperature has become one of the most important challenges in design of integrated circuits.

We attack the problem of thermal-aware design along three avenues. First, we tackle the problem at design time. We develop thermal-aware synthesis algorithms and tools for embedded processor design. For various stages of hardware/software co-synthesis, we aim to enable effective control of peak temperature and uniform thermal profiles. Particularly, we focus on incorporating thermal-awareness into synthesis (such as resource selection, allocation, and assignment, task scheduling, and memory allocation), and system management (such as DRAM system control). Second, we develop a self-adjusting paradigm to design structures with inherent resilience towards dynamic effects of temperature. We developed a Self-Adjusting Clock Tree Architecture (SACTA) to address this problem. SACTA guarantees correct timing behavior in pipelined circuits within a large range of thermal conditions through a self-adjusting, temperature-sensitive skew distribution mechanism. Finally, we approach the problem from the management perspective. We developed a systematic approach to design of thermal monitoring infrastructures for microprocessors systems. This entails, design of thermal sensing schemes and allocation and placement of thermal sensors in a given system.

In this talk, I will present an overview of research projects concerning these three aspects of thermal-aware design and management.

About the speaker: Dr. Seda Ogrenci Memik received her BS degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey and her PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of Northwestern University since September 2003. Her research interests include thermal-aware design automation, thermal management for high performance microprocessor systems, and embedded and reconfigurable computing. She received the National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2006. She has served as technical program committee member, organizing committee member, and sub-committee chair of several conferences, including ICCAD, DATE, FPL, GLSVLSI, and ARC. She is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems since 2007.

Presentation slides with audio