A Fast Leakage-Aware Full-Chip Transient Thermal Estimation Method

Accurate and fast thermal estimation is important for the runtime thermal regulation of modern microprocessors due to excessive on-chip temperatures. However, due to the nonlinear relationship between the leakage power and temperature, full-chip thermal estimation methods suffer slow speed and scalability issue when the increasing static leakage power is considered. In this work, we propose a new fast leakage-aware full-chip thermal estimation method. Unlike traditional methods, which use iteration to handle the leakage-temperature nonlinearity dependency issue, the new method applies a dynamic linearization algorithm, which adaptively transforms the original nonlinear thermal model into a number of local linear thermal models. In order to further improve the thermal estimation efficiency, a specially-designed adaptive model order reduction method is integrated into the thermal estimation framework to generate local compact thermal models. Our numerical results show that the new method is able to accurately estimate full-chip transient temperature distribution by fully considering the nonlinear leakage-temperature dependency with fast speed. On different chips with core number ranging from 9 to 36, it achieved 85x to 589x speedup in average against traditional iteration based method, with average thermal estimation error to be around 0.2°C.