(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004)
Ekpanyapong, Mongkol; Healy, Michael; Ballapuram, Chinnakrishnan S.; Lim, Sung Kyu; Lee, Hsien-Hsin Sean; Loh, Gabriel H.
Next generation deep submicron processor design will need to take into consideration many performance limiting factors. Flip flops are inserted in order to prevent global wire delay from becoming nonlinear, enabling deeper pipelines and higher clock frequency. The move to 3D ICs will also likely be used to further shorten wirelength. This will cause thermal issues to become a major bottleneck to performance improvement. In this paper we propose a floorplanning algorithm which takes into consideration both thermal issues and profile weighted wirelength using mathematical programming. Our profile-driven objective improves performance by 20% over wirelength-driven. While the thermal-driven objective improves temperature by 24% on average over the profile-driven case.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003)
Ekpanyapong, Mongkol; Minz, Jacob Rajkumar; Watewai, Thaisiri; Lee, Hsien-Hsin Sean; Lim, Sung Kyu
As process technology migrates to deep submicron with feature size less than 100nm, global wire delay is becoming a major hindrance in keeping the latency of intra-chip communication within a single cycle, thus decaying the performance scalability substantially. An effective floorplanning algorithm can no longer ignore the information of dynamic communication patterns of applications. In this paper, using the profile information acquired at the architecture/microarchitecture level, we propose a "profile-guided microarchitectural floorplanner" that considers both the impact of wire delay and the architectural behavior, namely the inter-module communication, to reduce the latency of frequent routes inside a processor and to maintain performance scalability. Based on our simulation results, the profile-guided method shows a 5% to 40% IPC improvement when clock frequency is fixed. From the perspective of instruction throughput (in BIPS), our floorplanner is much more scalable than a conventional wire length based floorplanner.