A Spectral Approach to Scalable Vectorless Thermal Integrity Verification
Zhiqiang Zhao1 and Zhuo Feng2
1Electrical and Computer Engineering Michigan Technological University Houghton, MI
qzzhao@mtu.edu
2Electrical and Computer Engineering Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, NJ
zfeng12@stevens.edu
ABSTRACT
Existing chip thermal analysis and verification methods require detailed distribution of power densities or modeling of underlying input workloads (vectors), which may not always be feasible at early-design stage. This paper introduces the first vectorless thermal integrity verification framework that allows computing worst-case temperature (gradient) distributions across the entire chip under a set of local and global workload (power density) constraints. To address the computational challenges introduced by the large 3D mesh-structured thermal grids, we propose a novel spectral approach for highly-scalable vectorless thermal verification of large chip designs. Our approach is based on emerging spectral graph theory and graph signal processing techniques, which consists of a thermal grid topology sparsification phase, an edge weight scaling phase, as well as a solution refinement procedure. The effectiveness and efficiency of our approach have been demonstrated through extensive experiments.
Keywords: Spectral Graph Sparsification, Algebraic Multigrid, Vectorless Verification.
