Thermal analysis experiences of a tri-core SoC system

Higher temperature induced by higher power density results in higher cost, lower performance and lower reliability. The thermal effects become important issues of today's VLSI design. In this paper, we adopt a RC-based thermal model to perform the steady-state and transient thermal analysis for a tri-core SoC system. The power information is generated from the ESL power estimation. The results show that the lateral heat dissipation cannot be ignored since hot spots occur in the vicinity where the nearby blocks with high power density, but none of hot spots with the highest power density. Finally, we also compare our fast RC based thermal analysis model with commercial CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software whose runtime is extremely slow. The results show the high degree of consistency.