Methodology for thermal aware physical design

Exponentially increasing power densities in current day designs due to aggressive technology scaling has resulted in temperature being one of the primary design constraint along with others like timing, area and power. Lot of design techniques are being adopted during physical design stage to minimize the power, apart from the architectural techniques like throttling for dynamic thermal management. In this work we propose a practical methodology for better thermal management by floorplan modifications based on thermal hotspots obtained through dynamic simulations, without disturbing the logical connectivity information. This methodology definitely warrants the benefits which can be readily realized by doing this analysis early in the design cycle. This can also improve the placement of the thermal sensors and boost additional performance which can be extracted by their delayed triggering, considering the lateral spreading due to better floorplanning.