Simulation of thermal behavior for Networks-on-Chip

Due to increasing integration densities and the emergence of nanotechnology, especially reliability and power related design aspects become critical for chip design. Since the arising problems are enforced by high circuit temperatures, the need for a possibility to model thermal behavior of a system in an accurate and physically correct way becomes inevitable. Hence, in this paper VulcaNoCs, a SystemC-based simulation environment for systems based on NoCs, is introduced. VulcaNoCs is designed to enable simultaneous execution of both high-level system simulation and dynamic modeling of temperature distributions in NoC-based systems. To emulate a system's thermal properties equivalent RC-circuits are used, exploiting the dualism between heat flow and electrical phenomena. To verify the temperature model, VulcaNoCs is compared to a more commonly used SPICE-based approach, exhibiting significant increases in simulation performance of up to 98,5% for modeling a 2×2 NoC, for example.