E1-NPU Thermal Capture Plan

Status: blocked Release use: prohibited_until_measured_sustained_evidence_passes

This plan defines the thermal evidence required before any sustained performance, throttling, or TOPS/W claim. It is not thermal evidence.

Required Capture

Use the workload plan in benchmarks/power/workload-plan.yaml and validate the filled manifest with:

python3 benchmarks/power/scripts/check_sustained_run_evidence.py \
  benchmarks/power/manifests/e1-npu-sustained-capture.<run-id>.json

Minimum requirements:

• 30 minute workload window after at least 120 seconds of warmup.
• Ambient temperature, cooling state, enclosure or fixture, operator, and board or phone serial number recorded.
• Die/package/board temperature trace aligned to power, frequency, and workload transcript timestamps within 1 second.
• Throttle state recorded for the full window.
• Stop conditions documented before the run starts.

Stop Conditions

• Any rail reaches the approved bench current limit.
• Die, package, board, or skin temperature crosses the approved lab limit.
• Thermal shutdown, clock throttling, or unexpected CPU fallback appears.
• Power, thermal, frequency, and workload traces cannot be timestamp-aligned.

Blockers

• No measured silicon or complete-phone target is available.
• No calibrated thermal sensor or thermocouple record is archived.
• No package, board, enclosure, airflow, or skin-temperature model is approved.
• Local OpenLane power is not a thermal source model for release.