Power-aware deployment and control of forced-convection and thermoelectric coolers

Abstract

Advances in the thermoelectric cooling technology have made it one of the promising solutions for spot cooling in VLSI circuits. Thermoelectric coolers (TECs) generate heat during their operation. This heat plus the heat generated in the circuit should be transferred to the ambient environment in order to avoid high die temperatures. This paper describes a hybrid cooling solution in which TECs are augmented with forced-convection coolers (fans). Precisely, an optimization framework called OFTEC is presented which finds the optimum TEC driving current and the fan speed to minimize the overall power consumption of the cooling system while maintaining safe die temperatures. Simulation results on a set of eight benchmarks show the benefits of the proposed approach. In particular, a baseline system without TECs but with a fan could meet the thermal constraint for only three of the benchmarks whereas the OFTEC solution satisfied thermal constraints for all benchmarks. In addition, OFTEC resulted in 5.4% less average power consumption for the aforesaid three benchmarks while lowering the maximum die temperature by an average of 3.7°C.