Improved method for logi-thermal simulation with temperature dependent signal delay

Abstract

Evolution of the semiconductor manufacturing allows integrating more components on a single die which further increase the complexity of the chips and introduce new design challenges. Power dissipation density has reached the limits of current cooling solutions, thus thermal-aware decisions must be taken into account during the design process. Co-simulating the logic function and thermal behaviour of the design can help to evaluate the performance of the system at various stages of the design process. Logi-thermal simulators use the switching activities of the system to predict the dissipated power and calculate the temperature distribution across the chip. The temperature dependence of certain parameters (such as delay) can also be considered during the co-simulation. This paper presents an improved method for temperature dependent signal delays compared to previous solutions. Our approach is based on mixed abstraction level logic simulation, which reduce the simulation time while the temperature distribution and the calculated delays remain accurate.