Synergistic Temperature and Energy Management in GALS Processor Architectures

We propose a synergistic temperature and energy management scheme for GALS processors. Localized DVS is applied in domains that contain hotspots, permitting other critical domains to run unabated, thereby reducing performance cost relative to global DVS, and also creating execution slack in peripheral cooler domains that can be exploited to save energy. The reduction in energy in turn creates a steeper temperature gradient between the domains, permitting heat to flow more easily out of the hotspot domain. This symbiotic cyclical relationship between temperature and energy management leads to both significantly better performance, and lower energy, than the use of DTM alone.