Architectural Thermal Energy Harvesting Opportunities for Sustainable Computing

Increased power dissipation in computing devices has led to a sharp rise in thermal hotspots, creating thermal runaway. To reduce the additional power requirement caused by increased temperature, current approaches apply cooling mechanisms to remove heat or apply management techniques to avoid thermal emergencies by slowing down heat generation. This paper proposes to tackle the heat management problem of computing platforms with a fundamentally new approach - instead of heat removal using cooling mechanisms and heat avoidance using dynamic thermal/power management techniques, this work investigates the mechanisms to recover wasted heat into reusable energy for sustainable computing.