Compilation optimization exploration for thermal dissipation reduction in embedded systems

The ever-increasing transistor integration density has allowed to design complex and powerful system-on-chips (SoC). As a consequence, the power density also increased significantly in the SoC, as well as, the accompanying heat. These two results have a negative impact on the performance of the SoC. Thermal dissipation and power-density are important factors that may degrade significantly the reliability and the lifetime of the SoC. These aspects will limit the next generation embedded system performances. Traditionally, thermal problems are solved by employing on advanced packaging and cooling solutions. But the modern high-performance SoC is already pushing the limits of what the cooling solutions can offer. By opposition to the existing approaches, in this paper, thermal dissipation is controlled at the source code level. The different compilation optimizations are explored to find the best performance/thermal dissipation tradeoffs.