CAREER: Thermal-Aware Synthesis of Embedded Processors

对嵌入式处理器的需求正从移动的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，必须提供更高级别的性能。为了满足这些需求，设计人员依赖于稳定的小型化和大规模集成。然而，这导致功率密度和故障率上升。芯片上消耗的功率被转换为热量。 当处理器输出的热量与嵌入式系统环境中常见的高温相结合时，可能需要昂贵的工艺来保持系统足够冷却以运行。由于成本和/或尺寸限制，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，本研究正在开发有效控制峰值温度和均匀热分布的设计技术。这包括在硬件和软件之间的功能划分中的热感知、协同综合设计流程内的综合（诸如资源选择、分配和指派、任务调度和存储器分配）以及软件优化（诸如数据布局优化）。嵌入式处理器设计中的有效温度管理将有助于维持高度复杂的高性能嵌入式处理器的技术扩展的可行性，从而支持新兴的消费产品。由于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，因此可以更有效地为各种嵌入式应用提供服务，并且可以在从日常消费应用到关键任务工程系统的各种领域中构思新的复杂应用。

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.