Thermal-aware compilation for system-on-chip processing architectures

Abstract

The development of compiler-based mechanisms to reduce the percentage of hotspots and optimize the thermal profile of large register files has become an important issue. Thermal hotspots have been known to cause severe reliability issues, while the thermal profile of the devices is also related to the leakage power consumption and the cooling cost. In this paper we propose several compilation techniques that, based on an efficient register allocation mechanism, reduce the percentage of hotspots in the register file and uniformly distribute the heat. As a result, the thermal profile and reliability of the device is clearly improved. Simulation results show that the proposed flow achieved 91% reduction of hotspots and 11% reduction of the peak temperature.

Temperature-Aware Design and Management for 3D Multi-Core Architectures

“…This work uses register renaming and variable live range splitting to achieve uniform thermal distribution. In addition, other work on thermally-aware register file utilization [78] targets the homogenous use of register window-based processing architectures. This work vir-tually splits the application to a number of smaller sub-applications, where each sub-application is assigned to a different register window for better thermal dissipation.…”

Wearout-aware compiler-directed register assignment for embedded systems

“…While the AVA was used for wearout balancing inside the active window, VMWCS preformed the inter-window wearout balancing. NBTI, PBTI and gate-oxide degradation were monitored for each benchmark, and the results for the proposed reliability aware compilation scheme, presented in this work, were compared to the default compilation scheme [6] and the thermal aware compilation scheme presented in [4]. The comparison with [4] enables us to determine the impact of stress on lifetime, separately from temperature.…”

“…However, the flexibility afforded by such compilers is rarely used towards reliability improvement. There has been some focus on compilerdirected thermal-aware register file assignments [4], since their relatively small area and high utilization make them one of the most likely candidates for overheating [5]. Since all wearout mechanisms have a strong dependence on temperature, this inherently leads to improvement in register file reliability.…”

Thermal-Aware Compilation for Register Window-Based Embedded Processors

“…• development of compilation techniques that improve the thermal profile of register window-based RF; • integration of the proposed mechanisms in the CoSy compilation flow [10], a professional retargetable compiler; • expanding the set of benchmarks conducted in [11] to cover a broader set of application types to assure the proposed flow robustness and effectiveness. Simulation results show significant enhancements in terms of reduction of hotspots up to 91%, as shown in Section IV-A.…”

“…We proposed a similar compilation flow in [11], which was proposed to a broad set of processing architectures. However, this letter differs from our previous work in: 1) a more focused analysis to register window-based embedded processors; and 2) the evaluation of the proposed flow effectiveness using an expanded set of benchmarks.…”