TAPHS: thermal-aware unified physical-level and high-level synthesis

Thermal effects are becoming increasingly important during integrated circuit design. Thermal characteristics influence reliability, power consumption, cooling costs, and performance. It is necessary to consider thermal effects during all levels of the design process, from the architectural level to the physical level. However, design-time temperature prediction requires access to block placement, wire models, power profile, and a chip-package thermal model. Thermal-aware design and synthesis necessarily couple architectural-level design decisions (e.g., scheduling) with physical design (e.g., floorplanning) and modeling (e.g., wire and thermal modeling). This article proposes an efficient and accurate thermal-aware floor-planning high-level synthesis system that makes use of integrated high-level and physical-level thermal optimization techniques. Voltage islands are automatically generated via novel slack distribution and voltage partitioning algorithms in order to reduce the design´s power consumption and peak temperature. A new thermal-aware floorplanning technique is proposed to balance chip thermal profile, thereby further reducing peak temperature. The proposed system was used to synthesize a number of benchmarks, yielding numerous designs that trade off peak temperature, integrated circuit area, and power consumption. The proposed techniques reduces peak temperature by 12.5degC on average. When used to minimize peak temperature with a fixed area, peak temperature reductions are common. Under a constraint on peak temperature, integrated circuit area is reduced by 9.9% on average