Inducing Thermal-Awareness in Multicore Systems Using Networks-on-Chip

Technology scaling imposes an ever increasing temperature stress on digital circuit design due to transistor density, especially on highly integrated systems, such as multi-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). Therefore,temperature-aware design is mandatory and should be performed at the early design stages. In this paper we present a novel hardware infrastructure to provide thermal control of MPSoC architectures, which is based on exploiting the NoC interconnects of the baseline system as an active component to communicate and coordinate between temperature sensors scattered around the chip, in order to globally monitor the actual temperature. Then, a thermal management unit and clock frequency controllers adjust the frequency and voltage of the processing elements according to the temperature requirements at run-time. We show experimental results of the infrastructure to implement effective global temperature control policies for a real-life 4-core MPSoC, emulated on an FPGA-based emulation framework.