A linear-time approach for the transient thermal simulation of liquid-cooled 3D ICs

Due to their compact structure, three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) present thermal dissipation issues. Integrated microchannels are emerging as a viable solution to dissipate the heat flux generated by 3D ICs. Several models have been proposed in literature to study different microchannel designs, but generally with low simulation performance. In this paper, we present an efficient model to simulate the transient thermal behaviour of 3D ICs using microchannels. This work introduces a novel low-footprint model based on adaptive discretization grids to deal with the complex geometry of 3D ICs. Additionally, we use the operator splitting method to compute the transient temperature with linear time in the number of grid cells. Our approach is compared with state-of-the art models and reports a 100× speedup while maintaining the same level of accuracy. Finally, using our methodology we demonstrate the importance of modelling the contribution to thermal dissipation of through silicon vias used for power distribution, which are usually neglected in state-of-the-art contributions.