Joint exploration of architectural and physical design spaces with thermal consideration

Heat is a main concern for processors in deep sub-micron technologies. The chip temperature is affected by both the power consumption of processor components and the chip layout. Therefore, for thermal-aware design it is crucial to consider the thermal effects of different floorplans during micro-architectural design space exploration. In this paper, we propose a thermal-aware architectural floorplanning framework. With the aid of this framework, an architect can explore both physical and architectural design spaces simultaneously to find an architecture and the corresponding chip layout that maximizes performance under a thermal limitation.