Hardware microprocessor thermal emulation using synthetic heat sources and temperature sensors in FPGA

This work presents an early evaluation of FPGA-based hardware thermal emulation methodology based on artificial heat sources and temperature sensors that can be used in real-time thermal simulation infrastructure. Main functional blocks of a microprocessor are emulated as controllable heaters - blocks with resources configured for artificially high power dissipation. Based on power inputs from an architecture-level simulator the power dissipated by the heaters is adjusted and their temperature is measured by embedded thermal sensors based on ring oscillators (RO). This allows for real-time thermal emulation of future multi-core microprocessor systems considering long time constants of whole cooling packages and also effects such as thermal coupling between the cores.