Efficient Temperature Aware Design for Portable Processors

Efficient temperature aware design in modern portable computers is becoming increasingly important. As technology moves into deep submicron feature sizes, the static or leakage power is expected to increase because of the exponential increase in leakage currents with technology scaling. Within die-process variation is increasing in nanometer technologies, it is observe that leakage power will become comparable to dynamic or total power dissipation in the next generation processors in the next few years. In the design of modern processors, power/thermal management issue has become a prominent aspect of portable computer systems to maintain safe temperature levels during program execution, it is also vital for the improvement of system reliability, which achieves maximum power density. This paper presents a hardware design for dynamic thermal management strategies that uses dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) for microprocessor’s power dissipation control, which is particularly appealing for portable and embedded systems. Simulation program is used to verify the theoretical idea and confirm the design operations. Results have shown that considerable amount of power consumption reduction as well as thermal aware challenges have been obtained.