CRI: IAD Temperature Measurement Infrastructure for Power, Variability, and Reliability Analysis

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Power consumption and related thermal effects of processor chips are worstening with each technology generation. Modeling the power and thermal behavior of processor chips requires challenging and complex validation approaches which, in some cases, may be unreliable. The proposed infrastructure project develops an infrared measurement setup that allows run-time power consumption of state-of-the-art processors to be accurately measured in real time. The proposed infrared measurement setup has a high spatial resolution (10x10um) with a high frame rate (125Hz) capacity to capture thermal maps of processor chips. The synchronized traces produced can be used to validate existing and newly proposed power and thermal models, and they can also be used to develop new process variability models for the design of future generation processor chips.