On Fundamental Principles for Thermal-Aware Design on Periodic Real-Time Multi-Core Systems

With the exponential rise of the transistor count in one chip, the thermal problem has become a pressing issue in computing system design. While there have been extensive methods and techniques published for design optimization with thermal awareness, there is a need for more rigorous and formal thermal analysis in designing real-time systems and applications that demand a strong exception guarantee. In this article, we analytically prove a series of fundamental properties and principles concerning the RC thermal model, peak temperature identification, and peak temperature reduction for periodic real-time systems, which are general enough to be applied on 2D and 3D multi-core platforms. These findings enhance the worst-case temperature predictability in runtime scenarios, as well as help to develop more effective thermal management policy, which is key to thermal-constrained periodic real-time system design.