A new electrothermally-aware methodology for full-chip temperature optimization

Due to the fact that there is electrothermal coupling between power, delay, and temperature, the paper presents a new electrothermally-aware methodology for full-chip temperature optimization. The main idea is that characteristics of temperature distribution can be improved dramatically by a certain given delay penalty. As an example, based on HotSpot, the optimization for AMD Athlon 64 processor in 90-nm technology is given in the paper. Simulation results show that the chip temperature and power optimized by the proposed method are decreased, temperature gradient is also reduced.