Evaluation of Thermal-Aware Design Techniques for Microprocessors

Abstract

As technology scales, temperature in modern highperformance VLSI circuits has increased dramatically. Temperature affects not only the performance but also the power, reliability, and cost of the system. In this paper, we examine two approaches to reduce the on-chip temperature: one is to reduce the power densities of hot functional units by allocating more die area (growing units), and the other one is to use three different migrating computation (MC) techniques to migrate activities among duplicated functional units. Through the use of tools for architectural power and temperature estimation, the effectiveness of these two methods are evaluated for the Alpha 21264 microprocessor.