Thermal Analysis of High-Performance Server SoCs from FinFET to Nanosheet Technologies

Rising power densities in large-scale server system-on-chip (SoC), with many cores, aggravate thermal reliability issues, especially in advanced technology nodes. In this paper, a thermal analysis of a server SoC is performed, considering a realistic layer stack configuration mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB) with an active heat sink for the cooling solution. We also propose a holistic co-optimization of the thermal interface material (TIM 1), cooling solution, and SoC design. In addition, we investigate the impact of heterogeneous power distribution within the SoC cluster. This paper also reports the thermal transients with different workload variations, which leads to improvement in thermal reliability and performance by ∼26% for the server SoC in an A10 node.