Thermal-aware body bias modulation for high performance mobile core

Thermal management, which dynamically throttles frequency and voltage, is de facto standard in high performance mobile SoC to sustain device surface temperature under specific level; and throttling must accompany with computation slowdown. To minimize performance loss, we present a new thermal management by using adaptive body bias which efficiently modulates speed and leakage current. The key problem is to optimize body voltage respect to performance as well as power in chip-to-chip process variation. We also propose a semicustom design flow with standard cells and commercial EDA tools for seamless adoption to commercial products. With the proposed method, we can reduce 12.3% of the quality loss caused by thermal management in a mobile SoC test vehicle. This is the first study and commercial use in thermal management at the best of our knowledge.