A Wavelet-Based Spatio-Temporal Heat Dissipation Model for Reordering of Program Phases to Produce Temperature Extremes in a Chip

Localized heating leads to generation of thermal hotspots that affect the performance and reliability of an integrated circuit (IC). Functional workloads determine the locations and temperatures of hotspots on a die. In this paper, we present a systematic approach for developing a synthetic workload to maximize the temperature of a target hotspot. Our approach is based on the observation that hotspot temperature is determined not only by the current activity in that region, but also by the past activities in the surrounding regions. Accordingly, we develop a wavelet-based canonical spatio-temporal heat dissipation model for program traces, and use a novel integer linear programming formulation to rearrange program phases to generate target worst case hotspot temperature. Program phase behavior is rooted in the static structure of programs. In this case, the initial set of program phases is extracted from the SPEC 2000 benchmark. We apply this formulation to target another well-known problem of maximizing the temperature between a pair of coordinates in an IC. Experimental results show that by taking the spatio-temporal effect into account, we can raise the temperature of a hotspot higher than what is otherwise possible. Hotspot temperature maximization is important in design verification and testing.