Thermal-Aware Memory Mapping in 3D Designs

DRAM is usually used as main memory for execution. The thermal behavior of a memory block in a 3D SIP is affected not only by the power behavior but also the heat dissipating ability of that block. The power behavior of a block is related to the applications run on the system while the heat dissipating ability is determined by the number of tier and the position the block locates. Therefore, a thermal-aware memory allocator should consider the following two points. First, allocator should consider not only the power behavior of a memory block but also the physical location during memory mapping, second, the changing temperature of a physical block during execution of programs. In this paper, we will propose a memory mapping algorithm taking into consideration the above-mentioned two points. Our technique can be classified as static thermal management to be applied to embedded software designs. Experiments show that our method can reduce temperature of memory system by 17.2 degrees C as compared to a straightforward mapping in the best case, and 13.4 degrees C in average.