Differentiating the roles of IR measurement and simulation for power and temperature-aware design

In temperature-aware design, the presence or absence of a heatsink fundamentally changes the thermal behavior with important design implications. In recent years, chip-level infrared (IR) thermal imaging has been gaining popularity in studying thermal phenomena and thermal management, as well as reverse-engineering chip power consumption. Unfortunately, IR thermal imaging needs a peculiar cooling solution, which removes the heatsink and applies an IR-transparent liquid flow over the exposed bare die to carry away the dissipated heat. Because this cooling solution is drastically different from a normal thermal package, its thermal characteristics need to be closely examined. In this paper, we characterize the differences between two cooling configurations-forced air flow over a copper heatsink (AIR-SINK) and laminar oil flow over bare silicon (OIL-SILICON). For the comparison, we modify the HotSpot thermal model by adding the IR-transparent oil flow and the secondary heat transfer path through the package pins, hence modeling what the IR camera actually sees at runtime. We show that OIL-SILICON and AIR-SINK are significantly different in both transient and steady-state thermal responses. OIL-SILICON has a much slower short-term transient response, which makes dynamic thermal management less efficient. In addition, for OIL-SILICON, the direction of oil flow plays an important role by changing hot spot location, thus impacting hot spot identification and thermal sensor placement. These results imply that the power- and temperature-aware design process cannot just rely on IR measurements. Simulation and IR measurement are both needed and are complementary techniques.