Exploring "temperature-aware" design in low-power MPSoCs

The power density in high performance systems continues to rise with every process technology generation, thereby increasing the operating temperature and creating ‘hot spots’ on the die. As a result, the performance, reliability and power consumption of the system degrade. To avoid these ‘hot spots’, ‘temperature-aware’ design has become a must. For low-power embedded systems though, it is not clear whether similar thermal problems occur. These systems have very different characteristics from the high performance ones: e.g., they consume 100 times less power. Therefore, we provide in this paper guidelines to delimit the conditions for which temperature-aware design is needed.