MiMAPT: Adaptive Multi-Scale Thermal Analysis at RT and Gate Level

The first paper related to MiMAPT software is presented at THERMINIC12 workshop, Budapest, 2012.

This paper introduces MiMAPT, a tool that I developed to do thermal, power and timing analysis of integrated circuits while accounting for on-die temperature non-uniformity.

Download Paper : sadri_therminic12

Brief :  Tight timing/area constraints produce on-chip layouts with non-regular shapes for RTL entities. Thus, grid-like floorplans where RTL entities are abstracted as rectangular blocks for thermal simulation lead to inaccurate results. In addition, spatial and temporal variability of chip workload causes localized temperature variations. Exact localization of hotspots at gate-level necessitates an extremely detailed spatial resolution which is very computationally intensive.
We propose MiMAPT, a tool capable of performing thermal simulation at RT and gate-level with multiple scales of spatio-temporal resolution. To demonstrate the tool advantages we run various tests for a sample chip. We show that our tool provides high level of flexibility in terms of speed vs. accuracy of results.

Here is an example operation of MiMAPT: At the first step, the analysis are done at RT level.

Then for suspicious cases the gate level simulation will be triggered.

And MiMAPT increases the resolution of analysis through performing further iterations.

 

Furthermore MiMAPT is capable of producing power/delay and temperature reports accounting for actual temperature of the chip. As expected, considering the full temperature map of the chip, the resulted physical locations for thermal hotspots are not necessarily the same as when analysis are done with the assumption of a uniform temperature for the entire chip. In the following figure we show the example physical positions for the hottest points in the design is different when we use the averaged chip temperature in comparison with using the full obtained temperature map.

Additional Material : THERMINIC12_ver2_brief

MiMAPT Software : is available upon request. If interested please send an email to my official email address.

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