3D-ICE: fast compact transient thermal modeling for 3D ICs with inter-tier liquid cooling

Three dimensional stacked integrated circuits (3D ICs) are extremely attractive for overcoming the barriers in intercon-nect scaling, offering an opportunity to continue the CMOS performance trends for the next decade. However, from a thermal perspective, vertical integration of high-performance ICs in the form of 3D stacks is highly demanding since the effective areal heat dissipation increases with number of dies (with hotspot heat fluxes up to 250W/cm2) generating high chip temperatures. In this context, inter-tier integrated mi-crochannel cooling is a promising and scalable solution for high heat flux removal. A robust design of a 3D IC and its subsequent thermal management depend heavily upon accu-rate modeling of the effects of liquid cooling on the thermal behavior of the IC during the early stages of design. In this paper we present 3D-ICE, a compact transient thermal model (CTTM) for the thermal simulation of 3D ICs with multiple inter-tier microchannel liquid cooling. The pro-posed model is compatible with existing thermal CAD tools for ICs, and offers significant speed-up (up to 975x) over a typical commercial computational fluid dynamics simulation tool while preserving accuracy (i.e., maximum temperature error of 3.4%). In addition, a thermal simulator has been built based on 3D-ICE, which is capable of running in par-allel on multicore architectures, offering further savings in simulation time and demonstrating efficient parallelization of the proposed approach.