The most recent, and arguably one of the most difficult obstacles to the exponential growth in transistor density predicted by Moore’s Law is that of removing the large amount of heat generated within the tiny area of a microprocessor. The exponential increase in power density and its direct relation to on-chip temperature have, in recent processors, led to very high cooling costs. Since temperature also has an exponential effect on lifetime reliability and leakage power, it has become a first-class design constraint in microprocessor development akin to performance. This dissertation describes work to address the temperature challenge from the perspective of the architecture of the microprocessor. It proposes both the infrastructure to model the problem and several mechanisms that form part of the solution. This research describes HotSpot, an efficient and extensible microarchitectural thermal modeling tool that is used to guide the design and evaluation of various thermal management techniques. It presents several Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) schemes that distribute heat both over time and space by controlling the level of computational activity. Processor temperature is not only a function of the power density but also the placement and adjacency of hot and cold functional blocks, determined by the floorplan of the microprocessor. Hence, this dissertation also explores various thermally mitigating placement choices

This dissertation presents a multi-faceted effort at developing standard System Design Language based tools that allow designers to the model power and thermal behavior of SoCs, including heterogeneous SoCs that include non-digital components. The research contributions made in this dissertation include: • SystemC-based power/performance co-simulation for the Intel XScale microprocessor. We performed detailed characterization of the power dissipation patterns of a variety of system components and used these results to build detailed power models, including a highly accurate, validated instruction-level power model of the XScale processor. We also proposed a scalable, efficient and validated methodology for incorporating fast, accurate power modeling capabilities into system description languages such as SystemC. This was validated against physical measurements of hardware power dissipation. • Modeling the behavior of non-digital SoC components within standard System Design Languages. We presented an approach for modeling the functionality, performance, power, and thermal behavior of a complex class of non-digitalcomponents — MEMS microhotplate-based gas sensors — within a SystemC