Abstract
The 3-D integrated circuits (3-D ICs) are emerging as a viable solution to enhance the performance of many-core platforms. These architectures generate a high and rapidly changing thermal flux that makes conventional air-cooled devices more susceptible to overheating. Liquid cooling is an alternative that can improve dissipation and reduce thermal issues. Fast and accurate thermal models are needed to appropriately dimension the cooling system at design time. Several models have been proposed to study different designs, but generally with low simulation performance. In this paper, we present an efficient model of the transient thermal behavior of liquid-cooled 3-D ICs. This paper presents an approach with extremely low memory usage and advanced numerical methods to efficiently compute the transient temperature of 3-D ICs. Our experiments show the $100\times $ speedup versus the state-of-the-art models, while maintaining the same level of accuracy, and demonstrate the efficiency of liquid cooling to remove the heat from 3-D many-core platforms.
Highlights
T HE 3-D integrated circuits (3-D ICs) are a class of devices gaining considerable interest from all the major players in the market
As air cooling struggles to dissipate the high heat flux generated by 3-D ICs, microchannel liquid cooling is shaping up as an effective alternative [2]
We show that for the modeling of 3-D ICs, the additional iterations introduced by an explicit method are more than compensated by the reduced complexity of each time-step
Summary
T HE 3-D integrated circuits (3-D ICs) are a class of devices gaining considerable interest from all the major players in the market. One of the main challenges for the design of effective 3-D ICs is temperature control [1] Their compact structure can lead to high temperatures, with uneven distributions, effectively reducing the performance and expected lifetime of these devices. As air cooling struggles to dissipate the high heat flux generated by 3-D ICs, microchannel liquid cooling is shaping up as an effective alternative [2]. Microchannels need to be dimensioned according to the expected heat flux, liquid flow rate, and the range of acceptable temperatures. Determining these parameters requires accurate thermal models. Solving the heat equation allows to determine the temperature everywhere in the target volume. Numerical methods are preferred, in particular the FDM, which is well suited to the rectangular geometry of ICs
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call