Thermal System Identification (TSI): A Methodology for Post-silicon Characterization and Prediction of the Transient Thermal Field in Multicore Chips

This paper presents a methodology for post-silicon thermal prediction to predict the transient thermal field a multicore package for various workload considering chip-to-chip variations in electrical and thermal properties. We use time-frequency duality to represent thermal system in frequency domain as a low-pass filter augmented with a positive feedback path for leakage-temperature interaction. This thermal system is identified through power/thermal measurements on a packaged IC and is used for post-silicon thermal prediction. The effectiveness of the proposed effort is presented considering a 64 core processor in predictive 22nm node and SPEC2006 benchmark applications.