Thermal modeling and analysis of 3-D ICs with heat dissipation effect of power distribution networks

High-performance three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) are now severely constrained by the thermal issue resulting from the high-power density and limited thermal conductivity among vertically stacked chips. The power distribution networks (PDNs) in 3D ICs are composed of good thermal conductors, but several existing methods are unable to demonstrate their heat dissipation effect successfully, and the thermal models of 3D ICs currently used are either incomplete or have significant errors. In this paper, the Adaptive Unit Difference Iterative (AUDI) method is proposed to establish the equivalent thermal model which can characterize the temperature distribution of 3D ICs accurately. Compared with the simulation results from the Finite Element Method (FEM) tool, the proposed model improves the computational efficiency greatly, and the error in temperature responses is within 3%. The model is used to analyze the effect of 3D PDNs parameters on temperature characteristics and the priority of temperature optimization is indicated, which is of significance for the thermal design.