CTSIM: Convolution-based thermal simulation using iterative methods

Abstract

Mobile processors push the envelope of thermal design due to lack of active cooling and heavy computational requirements. Many different use case applications must be analyzed to understand the thermal risks involved including the device leakage power, which has an exponential dependence on temperature. Commercial computational fluid dynamic (CFD) solvers generally take more than four hours for a single smartphone simulation with acceptable accuracy without accounting the for the leakage power. In this paper, CTSIM is presented which is a compact thermal solver (CTS) which uses convolution and iterative methods. CTSIM is as accurate as commercial solvers with a significant speed improvement in repeated simulation time for use case and benchmark analysis. Additionally, the temperature dependence on leakage is also accounted for correctly. The result is a fast and compact thermal model which provides commercial CFD accurate analyses with an 8000x speed improvement.