A Design-Specific and Thermally-Aware Methodology for Trading-Off Power and Performance in Leakage-Dominant CMOS Technologies

As CMOS technology scales deeper into the nanometer regime, factors such as leakage power and chip temperature emerge as critically important concerns for high-performance VLSI design. Consequently, enhancing processing performance is no longer the most important factor that dominates future circuit design considerations. This paper, for the first time, proposes a systematic methodology to determine a generalized design optimization metric for simultaneously trading-off power and performance in nanometer scale integrated circuits to achieve design-specific targets. The methodology incorporates interconnect effects as well as electrothermal couplings between substrate temperature, power, and performance for nanometer scale design optimization. Implications of choosing a specific design optimization metric on power, performance, and operating temperature are illustrated and discussed. The proposed methodology is shown to provide a more meaningful optimization metric (for power-performance tradeoff analysis) and basis, with considerations of chip-level thermal management including maximum allowable operating temperature and packaging/cooling solutions. Furthermore, implications of CMOS technology scaling and parameter variations on the proposed methodology are discussed.