ESL power analysis of embedded processors for temperature and reliability estimations

The ongoing scaling of CMOS technology facilitates the design of systems with continuously increasing functionality but also raises the susceptibility of these systems to reliability issues caused by high power densities and temperatures, respectively. Because of complexity reasons, the Electronic System Level (ESL) is gaining importance as starting point of design. Design alternatives are evaluated at ESL with respect to several design objectives, lately also including temperature. But temperatures are dominated by local power effects - a fact, that has not been sufficiently reflected at ESL until now. There is a lack of appropriate models, which we call ESL Power Density Gap. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we describe why the ESL Power Density Gap should be closed. In doing so, we want to stimulate a discussion. After that, we introduce a new ESL methodology for the power analysis of embedded processors, which can be considered as a first step to solve the aforementioned problem. It allows the generation of executable system models from a platform description, combining a functionality representation and component characterizations. Using an example application, it is shown that high power densities, usually invisible at ESL, can be uncovered by applying the proposed approach.