Tier-independent microfluidic cooling for heterogeneous 3D ICs with nonuniform power dissipation

Embedded microfluidic cooling is considered a promising solution for heat removal in 3D ICs. This paper presents tier-independent microfluidic cooling in a 2-tier chip thermal testbed. Each tier has 4 segmented heaters emulating a simplified multicore processor. Tier-independent cooling is shown to reduce the pumping power by 37.5% by preventing over-cooling when an operating temperature is specified. Thermal coupling for 3D chips with liquid cooling is also discussed.