Design of thermal management unit with vertical throttling scheme for proactive thermal-aware 3D NoC systems

The three-dimensional Network-on-Chip (3D NoC) has been proposed to solve the complex on-chip communication issues. However, the thermal problems become more exacerbated because of the larger power density and the heterogeneous thermal conductance in different silicon layer of 3D NoC. To regulate the system temperature, the Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) techniques will be triggered when the device is thermal-emergent. However, these kinds of reactive DTM schemes result in significant system performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a proactive DTM with vertical throttling (PDTM-VT) scheme, which is controlled by the distributed Thermal Management Unit (TMU) of each NoC node. Based on the expected temperature resulted from the proposed thermal prediction model, the TMU can early control the temperature of the thermal-emergent device. The experimental results show that the proposed thermal prediction model has less than 0.25% prediction error against actual temperature measurement within 50ms. Besides, the PDTM-VT can reduce 11.84%~23.18% thermal-emergent nodes and improve 0.47%~47.90% network throughput.