On-line thermal-aware task management for three-dimensional dynamically partially reconfigurable systems

Thermal management is a major design challenge in three-dimensional dynamically partially reconfigurable systems. Unlike three-dimensional integrated circuits, thermal management is more difficult in three-dimensional dynamically partially reconfigurable systems because of the extra heat generated by task reconfiguration. This study proposes an on-line thermal-aware task management scheme to reclaim the run-time thermal slack from low-power tasks, and uses a configurable thermal threshold to achieve a trade-off between the reconfiguration overhead and thermal distribution. The proposed scheme maximizes the tolerable task execution power to better utilize the system and provides a quality of service guarantee under the thermal constraint. This study also evaluates the capability of the proposed methodology using a series of experiments, presenting encouraging results.