Improving the accuracy of module based thermal modeling method for VLSI circuits design

Thermal-aware VLSI circuit design has become important for the advanced many-core and 3-D stacking architecture. Major bottlenecks in the design flow include the thermal modeling and analysis, which are both memory and time consuming. In this paper, we discuss the module based thermal modeling method, which divides the chip into modules and builds the thermal model by assembling the reduced module models. An accuracy enhancement framework is introduced in order to minimize the error at the module boundaries. Experiments on multi-core microprocessor show that the proposed technique leads to fast and accurate thermal analysis for VLSI circuits design.