Power aware physical model for 3d IC's

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric model for identifying thermal hotspots in 3D integrated circuits, revealing that hotspots can occur away from heat sources and proposing a minimal perturbation algorithm for thermal management.

Contribution

A novel continuous unit sphere geometric model for hotspot detection and a bipartite matching algorithm for minimal thermal imbalance correction in 3D ICs.

Findings

Hotspots can occur away from heat sources.

Heat sinks on active sources alone may be insufficient.

Proposed algorithm effectively reduces thermal imbalance.

Abstract

In this work we have proposed a geometric model that is employed to devise a scheme for identifying the hotspots and zones in a chip. These spots or zone need to be guarded thermally to ensure performance and reliability of the chip. The model namely continuous unit sphere model has been presented taking into account that the 3D region of the chip is uniform, thereby reflecting on the possible locations of heat sources and the target observation points. The experimental results for the - continuous domain establish that a region which does not contain any heat sources may become hotter than the regions containing the thermal sources. Thus a hotspot may appear away from the active sources, and placing heat sinks on the active thermal sources alone may not suffice to tackle thermal imbalance. Power management techniques aid in obtaining a uniform power profile throughout the chip, but we propose an algorithm using minimum bipartite matching where we try to move the sources minimally (with minimum perturbation in the chip floor plan) near cooler points (blocks) to obtain a uniform power profile due to diffusion of heat from hotter point to cooler ones.