Temperature-Aware Idle Time Distribution for Leakage Energy Optimization

Large-scale integration with deep sub-micron technologies has led to high power densities and high chip working temperatures. At the same time, leakage energy has become the dominant energy consumption source of circuits due to reduced threshold voltages. Given the close interdependence between temperature and leakage current, temperature has become a major issue to be considered for power-aware system level design techniques. In this paper, we address the issue of leakage energy optimization through temperature aware idle time distribution (ITD). We first propose an offline ITD technique to optimize leakage energy consumption, where only static idle time is distributed. To account for the dynamic slack, we then propose an online ITD technique where both static and dynamic idle time are considered. To improve the efficiency of our ITD techniques, we also propose an analytical temperature analysis approach which is accurate and, yet, sufficiently fast to be used inside the energy optimization loop.