Cooling of 3D-IC using non-uniform micro-channels and sensor based dynamic thermal management

Abstract

The three dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) brings new challenges to chip thermal management due to its high power density. Micro-channel based liquid cooling shows great potential in removing high density heat in 3D circuits. The current micro-channel heat sink designs spread the entire surface to be cooled with micro-channels. This approach, though might provide sufficient cooling, requires quite high pumping power. In this paper, we investigate designing of nonuniformly distributed micro-channel cooling systems which provide sufficient cooling with less pumping power. Using the proposed non-uniform micro-channel heat sink, dynamic thermal management is also investigated by tuning the pressure drop across the micro-channels. The experiments show that, compared with the conventional design which spreads microchannels all over the chip, our non-uniform micro-channel design and thermal management achieves more than 70% pumping power savings.

Thermoelectric Cooling

“…Recently, heat transfer in mini channels within heat exchangers is drawing substantial attention trying to improve their performance. The proper selection of channel dimensions and nonuniform distribution of the channels can improve the cooling power [107]. Therefore, thermal and hydrodynamic characteristics of channels need to be examined and developed.…”

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

“…However, the channel allocation technique primarily targets the improvement of energy efficiency instead of the thermal distribution. The same authors have extended this work and have proposed a methodology that includes the previously proposed non-uniform channel allocation mechanism alongside a run-time thermal management scheme [94] that both manages to reduce the cooling power consumption by up to 70%, when compared to uniform channel allocation.…”

Thermal management of 3D integrated circuits with microchannel-based liquid cooling

“…One way is to improve the current heatsink-based air cooling method with novel and economical heat conduction structures, such as the insertion of thermal-TSVs (T-TSVs) [169-171, 173, 176]. The other way is to use active cooling techniques with a higher cooling capability, such as microfluidic cooling methods [179,182,[185][186][187][188][189][190][191]. In this section, T-TSV enhanced air cooling and microfluidic cooling techniques will be reviewed.…”

“…Heat dissipation of over 100W/cm 2 with the air cooling solution poses a problem [180]. Inspired by the impressive and scalable cooling potential, many recent research works [182,[185][186][187][188][189][190] then covered by another piece of wafer or polymer plate through bonding [181,182].…”

“…In [185], Shi and Srivastava proposed a non-uniform microchannel design technique that optimizes the channel number by iteratively removing the channel that incurs the lowest thermal penalty. A DTM technique was then applied to adaptively change the flow rate according to the Kalman-filter-corrected thermal sensor readings.…”