Post-Silicon Characterization and On-Line Prediction of Transient Thermal Field in Integrated Circuits Using Thermal System Identification

Thermal system identification (TSI) is presented as a methodology to characterize and estimate the transient thermal field of a packaged IC for various workloads considering chip-to-chip variations in electrical and thermal properties. The time-frequency duality is used to identify the thermal system as a low-pass filter in frequency domain through on-line power/thermal measurements on a packaged IC. The identified characteristic system for an individual IC is used for on-line prediction of the transient thermal field of that specific IC for a power pattern. A test-chip, fabricated in 130-nm CMOS, demonstrates the effectiveness of TSI in post-silicon characterization and prediction of transient thermal field. The application TSI in thermal analysis of multicore processors is presented.