TAKING THERMAL CONSIDERATIONS INTO ACCOUNT DURING HIGH-LEVEL SYNTHESIS

Submicron feature sizes result in designs in which power density is si gnificantly increased. High-level synthesis strategies are proposed in this paper to relieve potential thermal problems. Operators are place d as close as possible to their data predecessors in order to minimize the interconnection cost while not violating the thermal constraints. Spreading overused functional units away from the thermal problem are a often results in performance degradation. Introducing redundant oper ators is suggested to reduce the module utilization and hence thermal problems among problem modules when system performance is important. O ur experimental results show that this technique produces quite satisf actory results for a power-dominated example.