Compact Thermal Modelling Tool for Fast Design Space Exploration of 3D ICs with Integrated Microchannels

Integrated microchannel cooling is a very promising concept for thermal management of 3D ICs, because it offers much higher cooling performance than conventional forced-air convection. The thermo-fluidic simulations of such chips are usually performed using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. However, due to the complexity of the fluid flow modelling, such simulations are typically very long and faster models are therefore considered. This paper demonstrates the advantages of TIMiTIC—a compact thermal simulator for chips with liquid cooling—and shows its practical usefulness in design space exploration of 3D ICs with integrated microchannels. Moreover, thermal simulations of a 3D processor model using the proposed tool are used to estimate the optimal power dissipation profile in the chip and to prove that such an optimal profile allows for a very significant (more than 10 °C) peak temperature reduction. Finally, a custom correlation metric is introduced which allows the comparison of the power distribution profiles in terms of the peak chip temperature that they produce. Statistical analysis of the simulation results demonstrates that this metric is very accurate and can be used for example in thermal-aware task scheduling or dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) algorithms.