Fast thermal simulation using SystemC-AMS

Abstract

Out of the many options available for thermal simulation of digital electronic systems, those based on solving an RC equivalent circuit of the thermal network are the most popular choice in the EDA community, as they provide a reasonable tradeoff between accuracy and complexity. HotSpot, in particular, has become the de-facto standard in these communities, although other simulators are also popular. These tools have many benefits, but they are relatively inefficient when performing thermal analysis for long simulation times, due to the occurrence of a large number of redundant computations intrinsic in the underlying models. This work shows how a standard description language, namely SystemC and its analog and mixed-signal (AMS) extension, can be used to successfully simulate the equivalent thermal network, by achieving accuracy comparable to existing simulators, yet with much better performance. Results show that SystemC-AMS thermal simulation can outpace HotSpot simulation by 10X to 90X, with speedup improving as the size of the thermal network increases, and negligible estimation error. As a further advantage, the adoption of the same language to describe functionality and temperature allows the simultaneous simulation of both dimensions with no co-simulation overhead, thus enhancing the overall design flow.