Integrated microfluidic power generation and cooling for bright silicon MPSoCs

Abstract

The soaring demand for computing power in our digital information age has produced, as an undesirable side-effect, a surge in power consumption and heat density for Multiprocessors Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs). The resulting temperature rise results in operating conditions that already preclude operating all the cores at maximum performance levels, in order to prevent system overheating and failures. With more power demands, MPSoCs will face a power delivery wall due to the reliability limitations of the underlying power delivery medium. Thus, state-of-the-art power and cooling delivery solutions are reaching their performance limits and it will no longer be possible to power up simultaneously all the available on-chip cores (situation known as dark silicon). In this paper we investigate a recently proposed disruptive approach to overcome the prevailing worst-case power and cooling provisioning paradigms for MPSoCs. This proposed approach integrates MPSoC with an on-chip microfluidic fuel cell network for joint cooling and power supply (i.e., localized power generation and delivery). By providing alternative means to power delivery integrated with cooling, MPSoCs are expected to gain in I/O connectivity. Based on this disruptive technology, we can envision the removal of the current limits of power delivery and heat dissipation in MPSoC designs, subsequently avoiding dark silicon and enabling a paradigm shift in future energy-proportional computing architecture designs. © 2014 EDAA.