Therm-FM: Foundation Model is ALL YOU NEED for 3D-ICs Thermal Simulation

TL;DR

Therm-FM introduces a foundation model-based neural operator for efficient and accurate 3D-IC thermal simulation, significantly reducing data needs and improving cross-design adaptability.

Contribution

It adapts a pretrained PDE foundation model to 3D-IC thermal simulation, incorporating multi-fidelity training to lower data costs and enhance accuracy.

Findings

Achieves up to 10.6x reduction in mean error.

Surpasses prior accuracy with less than 20% training data.

Effective in cross-chip adaptation with minimal target samples.

Abstract

Data-driven thermal predictors for 3D-ICs are often trained from scratch for each chip design using many high-fidelity finite-element simulations, leading to high data-generation cost and costly cross-design reuse. We propose Therm-FM, a neural operator framework that adapts a pretrained partial differential equation (PDE) foundation model to steady-state and transient 3D-IC thermal simulation. The motivation is that steady-state and transient chip-level heat conduction respectively share elliptic and parabolic operator structures with diffusion-type PDEs, allowing pretrained diffusion priors to provide an effective initialization for thermal-field prediction under heterogeneous materials, dense TSV/microbump interconnects, and package-level boundary conditions. To further reduce data-generation cost, Therm-FM incorporates a thermal-equivalent multi-fidelity training strategy that uses low-cost approximate simulations for thermal-domain adaptation and limited high-fidelity samples for calibration. Experiments on public HotSpot benchmarks and industrial 3D-IC package benchmarks show that Therm-FM achieves up to a 10.6x reduction in mean error and surpasses prior best accuracy with less than 20% of the training data. In cross-chip adaptation, it matches or surpasses full-data baselines in several metrics using only 10--30 target samples. We release datasets, source code, and pretrained models at https://github.com/haiyangxin/Therm-FM.