Thermal-aware cell and through-silicon-via co-placement for 3D ICs

Existing thermal-aware 3D placement methods assume that the temperature of 3D ICs can be optimized by properly distributing the power dissipations, and ignoring the heat conductivity of though-silicon-vias (TSVs). However, our study indicates that this is not exactly correct. While considering the thermal effect of TSVs during placement appears to be quite complicated, we are able to prove that when the TSV area in each bin is proportional to the lumped power consumption in that bin, together with the bins in all the tiers directly above it, the peak temperature is minimized. Based on this criterion, we implement a thermalaware 3D placement tool. Compared to the methods that prefer a uniform power distribution that only results in an 8% peak temperature reduction, our method reduces the peak temperature by 34% on average with even slightly less wirelength overhead. These results suggest that considering thermal effects of TSVs is necessary and effective during the placement stage. To ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Jason Cong, Guojie Luo, Yiyu Shi
• Keywords: Computer Aided Design Cad, Computer Aided Engineering, Computer Architecture, DAC 2011, Integrated Circuits Design