Event-based thermal control for high-density processors

The increasing computational density of modern processors, and the advent of 3D chip layouts, are making thermal control a requirement, often crucial for the life itself of the device. In demanding applications, traditional on/off control solutions - based e.g. on clock gating - cannot deliver the required regulation quality if not unacceptably reducing the computational performance of the system, while schemes based on modulating control require so fast sampling rates to cause an equally unacceptable overhead. In this paper we present an event-based thermal control scheme, capable of guaranteeing safe operation with a low effort. We also show how the proposed solution can be divided into a hardware and a software part, further improving efficiency. The claims above are supported by cycle-accurate simulations on a literature benchmark.