CAREER: Thermal-Aware Synthesis of Embedded Processors

对嵌入式处理器的需求正在从移动设备扩展到娱乐系统、家用电器和汽车。这些嵌入式处理器专为日益复杂的任务而设计，必须提供越来越高的性能水平。为了满足这些需求，设计师依赖于稳定的小型化和大规模集成。然而，这会导致功率密度和故障率上升。芯片上耗散的电能被转化为热量。当处理器的热量输出与嵌入式系统环境中经常出现的高温相结合时，可能需要昂贵的进程来保持系统足够的冷却才能运行。由于成本和/或大小限制，这样的解决方案对于嵌入式系统可能是不可行的。这个NSF职业项目为嵌入式处理器设计开发热感知综合算法和工具。在硬件/软件协同合成的各个阶段，这项研究正在开发设计技术，以有效控制峰值温度和均匀的热分布。这包括在硬件和软件之间的功能划分、综合(例如资源选择、分配和分配、任务调度和存储器分配)以及共同综合设计流程中的软件优化(例如数据布局优化)中的热感知。对嵌入式处理器设计中温度的有效管理将有助于维持支持新兴消费类产品的高度复杂、高性能嵌入式处理器的技术扩展的可行性。随着解决热设计问题的改进的设计方法和工具有助于生产低成本、可靠的嵌入式处理器，各种嵌入式应用程序可以得到更有效的服务，新的复杂应用程序可以在从日常消费应用程序到关键任务工程系统的各种领域中构思出来。

The demand for embedded processors is spreading from mobile devices to entertainment systems, appliances, and cars. These embedded processors are designed for increasingly complex tasks and have to deliver ever-higher levels of performance. To fulfill these demands, designers rely on steady miniaturization and large-scale integration. However, this results in rising power densities and failure rates. Power dissipated on a chip is converted to heat. When the heat output from the processor combines with the high temperatures frequently found in embedded system environments, expensive processes can be required to keep the system cool enough to run. Such solutions may not be feasible for embedded systems due to cost and/or size constraints. This NSF Career project develops thermal-aware synthesis algorithms and tools for embedded processor design. Throughout the various stages of hardware/software co-synthesis, this research is developing design techniques for effective control of peak temperature and uniform thermal profiles. This includes thermal-awareness in partitioning of functionality between hardware and software, synthesis (such as resource selection, allocation, and assignment, task scheduling, and memory allocation), and software optimizations (such as data layout optimization) within the co-synthesis design flow. Effective management of temperature in embedded processor design will help sustain the feasibility of technology scaling for highly sophisticated, high performance embedded processors that enable emerging consumer products. As the improved design methodologies and tools that address thermal design issues aid the production of low cost, reliable embedded processors, a variety of embedded applications can be serviced more effectively and new, sophisticated applications can be conceived in a variety of domains from everyday consumer applications to mission-critical engineered systems.