MiMAPT: Adaptive Multi-Resolution Thermal Analysis at RT and Gate Level

Tight timing/area constraints produce on-chip layouts with non-regular shapes for RTL entities. Thus, grid-like floorplans where RTL entities are abstracted as rectangular blocks for thermal simulation lead to inaccurate results. In addition, spatial and temporal variability of chip workload causes localized temperature variations. Exact localization of hotspots at gate-level necessitates an extremely detailed spatial resolution which is very computationally intensive. We propose MiMAPT, a tool capable of performing thermal simulation at RT and gate-level with multiple scales of spatiotemporal resolution. To demonstrate the tool advantages we run various tests for a sample chip. We show that our tool provides high level of flexibility in terms of speed vs. accuracy of results.