THERMINATOR: Modeling, control and management of thermal effects in electronic circuits of the future

Electronic devices of the latest generations are often required to operate in harsh environmental conditions, where the temperature may exceed the 100°C mark. This has a negative impact on several parameters of the electronic devices, ranging from slow-down and transient recoverable errors to permanent failures and device breakdown. To complicate the picture, electronic components tend to get warmer on their own as they operate, due to the fact that the power drawn by the devices from the power supply is dissipated by Joule effect. As time passes, heat and temperature management is becoming increasingly problematic, for reasons ranging from economical to technological ones. Packages that are able to sustain high temperatures are very expensive, and so are heat-sinks and cooling systems. In addition, high operating temperatures tend to cause malfunctioning of circuits and components, thus impacting the reliability of the electronic products which incorporate such devices. The development of new, thermal-aware design paradigms can no longer be postponed if the goal is to enable designers to fully exploit the electronic technologies of the future, being those CMOS or alternative to CMOS. This paper presents THERMINATOR, a EU-funded project that aims at providing an answer to these issues; it will address the following major challenges: 1) To devise innovative thermal models usable at different levels of abstraction, and to interface/integrate them into existing simulation and design frameworks. 2) To develop new, thermal-aware design solutions, customized for the different technologies and application domains of interest. 3) To enhance existing EDA solutions by means of thermal-aware add-on tools that will enable designers to address temperature issues.