Determining MPSoC layout from thermal camera images: work-in-progress

Abstract

In many safety-critical applications, Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoC) must operate within a given thermal envelope under harsh environmental conditions. Meeting the thermal requirements often requires using advanced task allocation and scheduling techniques that are guided by detailed power models. This paper introduces a method that has the potential to simplify the creation of such models. It constructs so-called heat maps from thermal camera images. By comparing the heat maps of different workloads, we identify the locations of on-chip components and the amount of heat produced by them. We demonstrate our method on the i.MX8QuadMax chip from NXP, where we identify the locations of CPU clusters, bigger CPU cores, GPUs, and DRAM controllers.