Fast thermal simulators for architecture level integrated circuit design

High temperatures and non-uniform temperature distributions have become a serious concern since they limit both performance and reliability of Integrated Circuits (IC). With computer architect's concern to position microarchitecture blocks in a processor, faster thermal models can be developed at the cost of hiding finer grain details such as circuit or transistor level information. Several methods to quickly estimate the surface temperature profiles of microarchitecture blocks have been investigated in recent years. HotSpot simulator is widely used in computer architecture community. SESCTherm is another architecture level thermal simulator which has shown good performance and modularity in modeling. Recently Power Blurring (PB) method has been developed for both steady-state and transient thermal analysis of standard and 3D chips. While some of these methods are validated against finite element and Green's function based techniques, there are no detailed comparisons of the accuracy and speed for some common applications. In this paper we present the steady-state and transient temperature distributions calculated by these three architecture level thermal simulators. A detailed comparison taking into account the accuracy and the computation speed is performed. Our results indicate that Power Blurring has the potential to be a promising architecture level thermal simulator for fast calculation of temperature profile from the input power map in a realistic package which, in turn, is a key ingredient for full self-consistent simulations.