#thermal

3 articles

01 ·Scaling & Power·FREE·8 min read Dark Silicon — You Can Place the Transistors, You Just Can't Light Them All The number of transistors you can put on a chip keeps rising, but the fraction you can switch on at the same time keeps falling. That gap is dark silicon. We derive it from one line about power density, check the numbers against the 2011 ISCA paper that made the term quantitative (21% of a fixed-size chip off at 22 nm, more than 50% at 8 nm), and follow the argument to why specialised circuits won. 02 ·Scaling & Power·★ MEMBER·11 min read Thermal Design from Scratch — The Wall in 3D Stacking Is Heat Nearly all the power that enters a chip leaves it as heat. Temperature is set by a series stack of thermal resistances, and once you stack dies vertically the hottest layer heats up with the square of the layer count. Heat flux and hotspots, the lag that thermal mass introduces, and which term liquid cooling actually removes — picking up where the power budget left off. 03 ·Device Physics·★ MEMBER·10 min read Reading Chip Design as a Power Budget — The Physics of Leakage and Heat A modern chip is limited not by what fits, but by how much of it can be lit at once. This piece reads that limit as a household budget: dynamic power versus leakage, the positive feedback that makes leakage swell with temperature, the thermal resistance that converts watts into degrees, and the three — and only three — ways a designer can spend the watts.