Thermal system identification (TSI): A methodology for post-silicon characterization and prediction of the transient thermal field in multicore chips

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for post-silicon thermal prediction to predict the transient thermal field a multicore package for various workload considering chip-tochip variations in electrical and thermal properties. We use time-frequency duality to represent thermal system in frequency domain as a low-pass filter augmented with a positive feedback path for leakage-temperature interaction. This thermal system is identified through power/thermal measurements on a packaged IC and is used for post-silicon thermal prediction. The effectiveness of the proposed effort is presented considering a 64 core processor in predictive 22nm node and SPEC2006 benchmark applications.

Post-Silicon Estimation of Spatiotemporal Temperature Variations Using MIMO Thermal Filters

“…A post-silicon thermal analysis methodology-TSIhas been proposed to estimate temperature considering inherent variations after fabrication of the chip [18]. Fig.…”

“…The basic concept of the TSI method was introduced and experimentally verified with a test chip in [18]. Cho et al [18] used a chip with a single power source and multiple sensors to validate the ability of TSI to predict transient temperature variations at the sensor locations.…”

“…This naturally considers inherent process variations, leakage power variations, and on-line thermal coupling effects. The basic approach is based on our prior work on post-silicon thermal analysis using thermal system identification (TSI) [18]. The prior work verified the ability to predict transient variation in temperature at the sensor locations due to a single power source.…”

Field programmable thermal emulator (FPTE): An all-silicon test structure for thermal characterization of integrated circuits

“…For sensing temperature, the conventional BJT based analog sensors are designed [2]. The design is shown in Fig.…”

“…The analog sensor design is based on the prior design[2]. The sensor output is the VBE of the BJT, labeled VREF in (a).…”