Thermal design and management of smartphones is concerned with a new challenge: the constraint of skin temperature. This constraint refers to the fact that the temperature at the device skin must not exceed a certain upper threshold. Reference showed that most people experience a sensation of heat pain when they touch an object hotter than 45˚C. Ideally speaking, distributing the heat uniformly onto the device skin results in the most effective heat dissipation. However, in practice, majority of the heat flows in vertical direction from the AP die, and thus hot spots with a high temperature are formed on the device skin.
To address this design challenge, we designed Therminator, a compact thermal modeling-based component-level thermal simulator targeting at small form-factor mobile devices (such as smartphones). It produces temperature maps for all components, including the AP, battery, display, and other key device components, as well as the skin of the device itself, with high accuracy and fast runtime. Therminator results have been validated against thermocouple measurements on multiple devices and simulation results generated by Autodesk Simulation CFD. In addition, Therminator is very versatile in the sense of handling different device specifications and component usage information, which allows a user to explore impacts of different thermal designs and thermal management policies. New devices can be simply described through an input file (in XML format). Finally, Therminator has implemented a parallel processing feature, allowing users to use GPU to reduce the runtime by more than two orders of magnitude for high-resolution temperature maps.
Therminator takes two input files provided by users. The specs.xml file describes the smartphone design, including components of interest and their geometric dimensions (length, width, and thickness) and relative positions. Therminator has a built-in library storing properties of common materials (i.e., thermal conductivity, density, and specific heat) that are used to manufacture smartphones. In addition, users can override these properties or specify new materials through the specs.xml file. The power.trace file provides the usage information (power consumption) of those components that consume power and generate heat, e.g., ICs, battery, and display. The power.trace can be obtained through real measurements or other power estimation tools/methods. power.trace is a separate file so that one can easily interface a performance-power simulator with Therminator.