隨著製程進步與需求，系統架構的複雜度提升以及三維晶片的出現，導致晶片功率密度大幅上升，熱效應對晶片的影響變得更不可忽視，而近年來電子系統層級的概念被提出，透過建立虛擬平台，設計者便可以在系統開發初期進行軟硬體共同設計與模擬驗證，同時也可以藉由溫度模擬器對系統進行溫度評估，其中暫態溫度分析更能夠提供設計者系統運作時的溫度變化趨勢，輔助發展系統溫度管理機制。但隨著系統複雜度上升，暫態溫度分析的速度也隨之受到影響，因此如何加速複雜度日漸提升的系統晶片之暫態溫度分析速度便是一個重要的問題。
本論文以通用圖形處理器輔助運算改良本實驗室所發展的Cooling Hotspot[4]溫度模擬器之暫態溫度分析速度，並提出以壓縮虛擬列稀疏矩陣向量乘法取代ㄧ般矩陣向量乘法減少不必要的運算，以及提出減少熱影格計算負載之方法，進ㄧ步提升使用通用圖形處理器時輔助運算的效率，達到加速暫態溫度分析速度的目的。

As the ever-increasing performance requirements of SOC and process technology scaling, the power density of system-on-a-chip (SOC) increases accordingly and creates high temperature on the chip. Since thermal issues have negative impacts on IC reliability and performance, they have become important design constraints. At the same time, the concept of electronic system level design has been proposed for improving development efficiency as system complexity of SOC increases, the developers can build a virtual platform for the target SOC at a higher level of abstraction to perform quick software and hardware co-simulations and co-verifications at early stage of design. Considering thermal issues have become important design constraints, the developers should add thermal profiling mechanisms to the virtual platform. In thermal analyses, the transient thermal analysis can provide a dynamic on-chip temperature trend, which is a useful information for developing temperature management mechanisms. However, as the computation complexity increases, the transient thermal analysis speed decreases dramatically.

This thesis uses not only GPU to assist the transient thermal analysis of Cooling Hotspot [4] thermal simulator, but also proposes a Virtual-Row Compressed Sparse Row sparse matrix vector multiplication algorithm to replace the ordinary matrix vector multiplication., Furthermore, a thermal frame computing load reduction method is devised to further improve the efficiency of GPU-assist computation. After applying the proposed methods, the speedup is about 10.455 times larger compared to the original Cooling Hotspot.

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