A Fast Leakage-Aware Green’s-Function-Based Thermal Simulator for 3-D Chips
Hameedah Sultan, Smruti R. Sarangi
Abstract
In this article, we propose a fast thermal modeling tool, 3DSim, using a Green's-function-based approach. Green's-function-based approaches have been shown to be faster than the traditional finite-difference-based techniques. Our proposed tool can model steady-state and transient thermal profiles for both 2-D and 3-D chips, which may contain multiple active layers and fluid-carrying microchannels for heat removal. The unique advantage of our tool is that it models leakage power analytically using a piecewise-linear leakage model, thereby eliminating the need to iterate multiple times through the leakage-temperature feedback loop. We use several algebraic techniques and transforms to compute the thermal profile analytically and thereby speedup the process of calculation. To the best of our knowledge, transform-based approaches have not been used before to model the temperature in 3-D chips with microchannels. Our approach provides a 150× speedup over state-of-the-art thermal simulators, with an error limited to 5%.