Machine Learning-Assisted Thermoelectric Cooling for On-Demand Multi-Hotspot Thermal Management

The rapid emergence of System-on-Chip (SoC) technology introduces multiple dynamic hotspots with spatial and temporal evolution to the system, necessitating a more efficient, sophisticated, and intelligent approach to achieve on-demand thermal management. In this study, we present a novel machine learning-assisted optimization algorithm for thermoelectric coolers (TECs) that can achieve global optimal temperature by individually controlling TEC units based on real-time multi-hotspot conditions across the entire domain. A convolutional neural network (CNN) with inception module is trained to comprehend the coupled thermal-electrical physics underlying the system and attain accurate temperature predictions with and without TECs. Due to the intricate interaction among passive thermal gradient, Peltier effect and Joule effect, a local optimal TEC control experiences spatial temperature trade-off which may not lead to a global optimal solution. To address this issue, a backtracking-based optimization algorithm is developed using the designed machine learning model to iterate all possible TEC assignments for attaining global optimal solutions. For arbitrary m by n matrix with NHS hotspots (n, m less than 10 and NHS less than 20), our algorithm is capable of providing global optimal temperature and its corresponding TEC array control in an average of 1.07 second while iterating through tens of temperature predictions behind-the-scenes. This represents a speed increase of over four orders of magnitude compared to traditional FEM strategies which take approximately 18 minutes.