Efficient thermoelectric cooling for mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile apps suffer large performance degradation when the underlying processors are throttled to cool down the devices. Fans or heat sinks are not a viable option for mobile devices, thus calling for a new portable cooling solution. Thermoelectric coolers are scalable and controllable cooling devices that can be embedded into mobile devices on the chip surface. This paper presents a thermoelectric cooling solution that enables efficient processor thermal management in mobile devices. Our goal is to minimize performance loss from thermal throttling by efficiently using thermoelectric cooling. Since mobile devices experience large variations in workloads and ambient temperature, our solution adaptively controls cooling power at runtime. Our evaluation on a smartphone using mobile benchmarks demonstrated that the performance loss from the maximum speed is only 1.8% with the TEC compared to 19.2% without the TEC.