On chip Communication-Architecture Based Thermal Management for SoCs

In current Systems-on-Chip (SoC) designs, managing peak temperature is critical to ensure operation without failure. Our novel Communication Architecture Based Thermal Management (CBTM) scheme manages thermal behavior of components by delaying the execution of chosen IP-blocks or components by regulating the flow of data over the on-chip communication bus. This temperature aware traffic flow over the bus is achieved by dynamically changing the communication priority table in response to thermal readings from sensors. With CBTM, the temperatures of individual components can be controlled selectively. In this paper we demonstrate the effectiveness of CBTM on four industrial size SoC designs and also evaluate its performance impact. We observe that CBTM maintained thermal thresholds and reduced the peak temperature of an SoC by as much as 29°C.