Power Management of Monolithic 3D Manycore Chips with Inter-tier Process Variations

Abstract

Voltage/frequency island (VFI)-based power management is a popular methodology for designing energy-efficient manycore architectures without incurring significant performance overhead. However, monolithic 3D (M3D) integration has emerged as an enabling technology to design high-performance and energy-efficient circuits and systems. The smaller dimension of vertical monolithic inter-tier vias (MIVs) lowers effective wirelength and allows high integration density. However, sequential fabrication of M3D layers introduces inter-tier process variations that affect the performance of transistors and interconnects in different layers. Therefore, VFI-based power management in M3D manycore systems requires the consideration of inter-tier process variation effects. In this work, we present the design of an imitation learning (IL)-enabled VFI-based power-management strategy that considers the inter-tier process-variation effects in M3D manycore chips. We demonstrate that the IL-based power-management strategy can be fine-tuned based on the M3D characteristics. Our policy generates suitable V/F levels based on the computation and communication characteristics of the system for both process-oblivious and process-aware configurations. We show that the proposed process-variation-aware IL-based VFI implementation for M3D manycore chips lowers the overall energy-delay-product (EDP) by up to 16.2% on average compared to an ideal M3D system with no M3D process variations.