3D-ICE: Fast compact transient thermal modeling for 3D-ICs with inter-tier liquid cooling

Arvind Sridhar, Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne

Abstract: Three dimensional stacked integrated circuits (3D ICs) are extremely attractive for overcoming the barriers in interconnect scaling, offering an opportunity to continue the CMOS performance trends for the next decade. However, from a thermal perspective, vertical integration of high-performance ICs in the form of 3D stacks is highly demanding since the effective areal heat dissipation increases with number of dies (with hotspot heat fluxes up to 250W/cm2) generating high chip temperatures. In this context, inter-tier integrated microchannel cooling is a promising and scalable solution for high heat flux removal. A robust design of a 3D IC and its subsequent thermal management depend heavily upon accurate modeling of the effects of liquid cooling on the thermal behavior of the IC during the early stages of design. In this talk a new compact transient thermal model (CTTM), called 3D-ICE, is presented. 3D-ICE is meant for the thermal simulation of 3D ICs with multiple inter-tier microchannel liquid cooling. The proposed model is compatible with existing thermal CAD tools for ICs, and offers significant speed-up (up to 975x) over a typical commercial computational fluid dynamics simulation tool while preserving accuracy (i.e., maximum temperature error of 3.4%). In addition, a preliminary multithreaded version of 3D-ICE has built, which is capable of running in parallel on multicore architectures, offering further savings in simulation time and demonstrating efficient parallelization of the proposed approach.

3D-ICE has been made available as an open source Thermal Library software with detailed and illustrative documentation at http://esl.epfl.ch/3d-ice.html. It is ideal for electronic designers, researchers involved in thermal investigation of ICs and mechanical engineers interested in designing liquid cooled heat sinks.

About the speaker: Arvind Sridhar is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the Embedded Systems Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. David Atienza. His research interests include Simulation and Optimization CAD, Thermal Modeling, 3D ICs and Multiphysics Simulation.

He obtained a Bachelors Degree in Electronics Engineering from College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University, Madras, India; and a Master of Applied Sciences in Electronics from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, with a major in VLSI CAD.