STREAM: Stress and Thermal Aware Reliability Management for 3-D ICs

Abstract

Accurate and fast reliability management is important for 3-D integrated circuits (3-D ICs) because of the severe on-chip thermal and reliability problems. However, due to the lack of stress information and difficulties in implementing management method for reliability, existing full-chip reliability management methods suffer from low management accuracy and high system performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a new stress and thermal aware reliability management method for 3-D ICs called STREAM. Unlike traditional methods which do not perform explicit stress analysis due to the large computing cost, STREAM employs an artificial neural network-based stress model to estimate stress accurately at runtime. In order to further improve the reliability management accuracy and improve the system performance, a lifetime estimator with lifetime banking technology and a specially designed lifetime model predictive control are integrated into the reliability management framework. Our numerical results show that STREAM performs the stress and thermal aware full-chip reliability management with both high accuracy and speed. It is able to boost the performance of 3-D ICs and outperforms the state-of-the-art 3-D IC reliability management method.