Taking Thermal Considerations Into Account During High-Level Synthesis

Abstract

Submicron feature sizes result in designs in which power density is significantly increased. High-level synthesis strategies are proposed in this paper to relieve potential thermal problems. Operators are placed as close as possible to their data predecessors in order to minimize the interconnection cost while not violating the thermal constraints. Spreading overused functional units away from the thermal problem area often results in performance degradation. Introducing redundant operators is suggested to reduce the module utilization and hence thermal problems among problem modules when system performance is important. Our experimental results show that this technique produces quite satisfactory results for a powerdominated example.