Extending a multi-level logi-thermal simulation framework to a mixed signal thermal aware simulation environment using SystemC-AMS

Abstract

With the advance of the semiconductor technology power density and related thermal management issues became design bottlenecks. These physical limits require design engineers to make several thermal aware decisions during the design process: the earlier the better. Modern hardware description languages have extensions for simulation of mixed-signal circuits (e.g. SystemC-AMS, Verilog-AMS, VHDL-AMS) but none of these approaches support co-simulation of the effect of the foreseen thermal environment of the design with the logic behavior. A relatively new simulation paradigm called logi-thermal simulation is aimed to fill this gap in the available set of simulation tools. Our framework for co-simulation of logic and thermal behavior called LogiTherm contains generic interfaces towards usual logic and thermal simulation engines. In our present framework setup SystemC and Verilog is supported as hardware description languages and two thermal field solvers, SUNRED and 3D-ICE can be used as thermal simulation engines. In this paper we present the recent developments of the LogiTherm framework that enable logi-thermal simulation of mixed signal designs. We demonstrate the capability of our system by presenting simulation results of a test system, which contains a microprocessor and mixed signal components as well.