3D-ICE: A Compact Thermal Model for Early-Stage Design of Liquid-Cooled ICs

Abstract

Abstract-Liquid-cooling using microchannel heat sinks etched on silicon dies is seen as a promising solution to the rising heat fluxes in two-dimensional and stacked three-dimensional integrated circuits. Development of such devices requires accurate and fast thermal simulators suitable for early-stage design. To this end, we present 3D-ICE, a compact transient thermal model (CTTM), for liquid-cooled ICs. 3D-ICE was first advanced incorporating the 4-resistor model-based CTTM (4RM-based CTTM). Later, it was enhanced to speed up simulations and to include complex heat sink geometries such as pin fins using the new 2 resistor model (2RM-based CTTM). In this paper, we extend the 3D-ICE model to include liquid-cooled ICs with multi-port cavities, i.e., cavities with more than one inlet and one outlet ports, and non-straight microchannels. Simulation studies using a realistic 3D multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) with a 4-port microchannel cavity highlight the impact of using 4-port cavity on temperature and also demonstrate the superior performance of 2RM-based CTTM compared to 4RM-based CTTM. We also present an extensive review of existing literature and the derivation of the 3D-ICE model, creating a comprehensive study of liquid-cooled ICs and their thermal simulation from the perspective of computer systems design. Finally, the accuracy of 3D-ICE has been evaluated against measurements from a real liquid-cooled 3D-IC, which is the first such validation of a simulator of this genre. Results show strong agreement (average error < ), demonstrating that 3D-ICE is an effective tool for early-stage thermal-aware design of liquid-cooled 2D-/3D-ICs.

Integrated microfluidic power generation and cooling for bright silicon MPSoCs

“…With the applied flow rate, which is translated to an average flow velocity of 1.4 m/s, the target MPSoC is kept at relatively low temperatures, with 41 o C peak value. It is important to mention however that this flow rate corresponds to a pressure drop of 1.5 bar/cm, which is comparable with the pressure drops used for microchannel liquid cooling in the literature [7].…”

“…7). In this analysis, we use both COMSOL [19] and the compact thermal model 3D-ICE [7] for system-level evaluation. Fig.…”

“…Single-or two-phase cooling of ICs can dynamically adapt to changes in heat dissipations, reduce energy spent on cooling [6] and enable even denser packaging of devices via 3D stacking of ICs with interlayer cooling of such devices [6][7][8]. Recent advances in this cooling technology have delivered promising results and given rise to a new idea: to combine liquid cooling of ICs with on-chip power generation to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional approaches to achieving energy efficiency described above.…”

Temperature-Aware Design and Management for 3D Multi-Core Architectures

“…More advances show that 3D-ICE can even reach speed-ups up to 13478x with 10% peak temperature error [54]. Finally, the recent validations against a realistic test bed [55] show that 3D-ICE achieves an average error of 8.5% with respect to experimental thermal measurements of the test bed (cf. Fig.…”

ICCAD 2015 contest in 3D interlayer cooling optimized network

“…Modeling methods for thermal simulation of ICs with microchannels already exist in in the literature [2]. These tools and methods are useful for evaluating designs.…”