Accurate Temperature-Dependent Integrated Circuit Leakage Power Estimation is Easy

Abstract

It has been the conventional assumption that, due to the superlinear dependence of leakage power consumption on temperature, and widely varying on-chip temperature profiles, accurate leakage estimation requires detailed knowledge of thermal profile. Leakage power depends on integrated circuit (IC) thermal profile and circuit design style. The authors show that linear models can be used to permit highly-accurate leakage estimation over the operating temperature ranges in real ICs. The authors then show that for typical IC packages and cooling structures, a given amount of heat introduced at any position in the active layer will have similar impact on the average temperature of the layer. These two observations allow us to prove that, for wide ranges of design styles and operating temperatures, extremely fast, coarse-grained thermal models, combined with linear leakage power consumption models, permit highly-accurate system-wide leakage power consumption estimation. The results of our proofs are further confirmed via comparisons with leakage estimation based on detailed, time-consuming thermal analysis techniques. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique yields a 59,259times-1,790,000times speedup in leakage power estimation while maintaining accuracy