On-Chip Thermal Gradient Analysis and Temperature Flattening for SoC Design

Abstract

This paper quantitatively analyzes thermal gradient of SoC and proposes a thermal flattening procedure. First, the impact of dominant parameters, such as area occupancy of memory/logic block, power density, and floorplan on thermal gradient are studied quantitatively. Temperature difference is also evaluated from timing and reliability standpoints. Important results obtained here are 1) the maximum temperature difference increases with higher memory area occupancy and 2) the difference is very floorplan sensitive. Then, we propose a procedure to amend thermal gradient. A slight floorplan modification using the proposed procedure improves on-chip thermal gradient significantly.