Transient Thermal Simulation of Liquid-Cooled 3-D Circuits

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 100x 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.