Architecture Carbon Tool v3: Enabling Sustainability-aware Silicon System Design Exploration
For system architects and chip designers, it provides a tool to incorporate sustainability as a design metric, though it is an incremental update to existing tools.
The paper presents ACT3, an updated tool for modeling the carbon cost of semiconductor devices, enabling sustainability-aware architectural design space exploration with enhanced modeling capabilities and case studies.
As the carbon cost of manufacturing and operating semiconductor devices has come into sharper focus, sustainability has gradually emerged as a new system architecture design metric. Like power and performance modeling tools, enabling sustainability-aware silicon systems design and optimizations will require a new generation of electronic design automation and architectural modeling tools. Towards this end, we present an update to the Architecture Carbon Tool v3 (ACT3) which aims to provide an extensible and customizable modeling platform for research and advanced development to pave the path towards sustainability-aware architectural design space exploration. Compared to previous versions of ACT, ACT3 provides significantly richer modeling capabilities, enhanced collateral and analysis telemetry, and first order design space exploration capabilities. This technical brief provides an overview of these expanded capabilities and illustrates ACT3's basic utility across several case studies. Finally, we identify opportunities for research and development where we expect the research community can contribute towards continuing to improve sustainability modeling and design methodology for silicon systems.