Transient thermal management of portable electronics using heat storage and dynamic power dissipation control

Abstract

Under static power dissipation and steady-state thermal management designs high performance chip sets with high power dissipation are difficult to incorporate into portable electronics with low heat removal rate. We propose a transient thermal management strategy that enables chip sets with high peak power dissipation to be used in electronic systems with low heat removal rate. Packaging design, thermal management and system design are closely integrated to utilize heat storage and dynamic power dissipation control. This facilitates much higher burst mode workload processing performance than is possible with conventional low-power designs based on static thermal management techniques. Portable system heat storage design, dynamic power dissipation control, and system/integrated circuit (IC) design implementation issues are also discussed. A quantitative evaluation of transient thermal operation metrics based on integrated workload, queuing, dynamic power dissipation control, heat transfer, and thermal-mechanical reliability simulation indicates that transient thermal management promises significant performance enhancement for portable electronics while maintaining low total power dissipation, low heat removal rate, and thermal-mechanical reliability.