Tutorial T7A: New Modeling Methodologies for Thermal Analysis of 3D ICs and Advanced Cooling Technologies of the Future

Increasing circuit densities, the proliferation of Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chips (MPSoCs) and high performance computing systems have resulted in an alarming rise in electronic heat dissipation levels, making the conventional thermal management strategies, including air cooled heat sinks, obsolete. The latest advancements in 3D Integration of IC dies have only aggravated this problem, creating a strong worldwide research interest in the development of advanced cooling technologies, such as interlayer microchannel liquid cooled heat sinks, to maintain ICs under safe operating temperatures. While this research has helped create a substantial amount of knowledge base pertaining to the heat transfer mechanism in advanced liquid cooling systems as applied to electronic circuits, this knowledge is yet to be transferred to the EDA community for it to be incorporated in the IC thermal simulators of the future. The existence of such tools becomes absolutely essential when IC designers are faced with the challenge of ascertaining the thermal reliability of their designs in the presence of liquid cooling systems. This tutorial aims to introduce the attendees to the key concepts that are needed to compute IC temperatures with and without microchannel liquid cooling and the principles behind compact modeling of forced convective heat transfer in advanced IC cooling technologies. A major part of this tutorial is based on the 3D-ICE thermal simulator, which has been built by the Embedded Systems Laboratory in EPFL, Switzerland (URL: http://esl.epfl.ch/3D-ICE). This simulator is based on the Compact Transient Thermal Modeling for forced convective cooling advanced by our research group. Since its release in 2010, more than 50 research groups across the world have downloaded it and are actively using it for their research.