A Fast and Low Computation Consumption Model for System-Level Thermal Management in 3D IC

With the rapid increment of the power density and the introduction of vertical stac k, heat dissipation has become a challenge issue. Thermal-aware placement thereby attracts more and more attentions for 3D IC. Meanwhile, as the keep-going scaling-down of IC, a huge computation consumption was caused by the large scale span. In this paper, an equivalent anisotropic thermal conductivity model was introduced to low down the computation consumption caused by the huge feature size difference. Correctness of this model was verified and the deviation from a full-scale simulation was less than 20%. By applying this model, thermal di stribution of a designed 3D IC with 1566 TSVs and 80504 hot-spots was obtained with the total computation time of about 24 minutes in a regular personal computer.