Thermal-Aware Design and Management of Embedded Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Modern embedded systems face challenges in managing on-chip temperature as they are increasingly realized in powerful system-on-chips. This paper presents thermal-aware design and management of embedded systems by tightly coupling two mechanisms, thermal-aware utilization bound and real-time dynamic thermal management. The former provides the processor utilization upper-bound to meet the chip temperature constraint that depends not only on the system configurations and workloads but also chip cooling capacity and environment. The latter adaptively optimizes rates of individual task executions subject to the thermal-aware utilization bound. Our experiments on an automotive controller demonstrate the thermal-aware utilization bound and improved system utilization by 18.2 % compared with existing approaches.