Exploiting thermal-area tradeoffs in high-level synthesis through resources number selection

Thermal crisis has been widely regarded by IC industry. High temperature heavily impacts on reliability, performance, cooling cost and power consumption of ICs. High temperature can be reduced by increasing area. However arbitrarily large area, namely high number of resources in high-level view, dramatically increases IC cost. This paper proposes a technique to achieve proper thermal-area tradeoff. First the most proper resource numbers are identified to equalize different types of resourcespsila power density. And then heuristic synthesis strategy aims to make same types of resourcespsila power density even. We demonstrate that, the proper resources number is achieved when power density of all resources is even. Our solution with the most proper resources number can be a better starting point for the subsequent incremental improvement. As the same area increases, our global optimal solution reduces 44% more peak temperature than our local optimal solution.