System thermal analysis of 3D IC on ESL virtual platform

Abstract

With the growing demand of multiprocessor system-onchip (MPSoC) and 3D IC technology evolution, it is crucial to address power and thermal issues during system architecture design. Electronic system level (ESL) design is an acknowledged effective methodology to explore system design by virtual platforms. However, and to our best knowledge, current ESL virtual platforms only consider the performance and power issues. Therefore, we propose a run-time system thermal analysis framework for applications to an ESL virtual platform in order to analyze the thermal issue at an abstract level. In the experiment, the average estimation error of temperature was 3.18%, while the maximal estimation error was only 6.36% for ANSYS ICEPAK. The framework thus can help system designers explore power and thermal management at the early stages of IC development.

Methodology for developing virtual platforms from power‐aware to power‐ and thermal‐aware at electronic system level

“…The experiment was designed to compare the temperature of 3D‐QPS between HotSpot (version 5.02) used in [8] and RTE by steady‐state thermal analysis. In the work, the environment of 3D‐QPS is shown in Table 6 with parameters for volume ( V ), thermal conductivity ( k ), and heat capacity of unit volume () for materials.…”

“…To date, the thermal simulators [11, 12] have been integrated with the related work [8–10] at the ESL by revising the complex interface of the thermal simulators. Chiou et al [8] presented a thermal analysis framework of runtime system for an ESL VP.…”

“…To date, the thermal simulators [11, 12] have been integrated with the related work [8–10] at the ESL by revising the complex interface of the thermal simulators. Chiou et al [8] presented a thermal analysis framework of runtime system for an ESL VP. The authors utilised the electrical linear network model of SystemC‐AMS to build a thermal model of a resistance–capacitance (RC) network, and the RC data was obtained by HotSpot [11].…”

“…Power and thermalaware virtual platforms (PTAVPs) can then provide better insight into power consumption and heat distribution to develop control methods for power and thermal management. To the best of our knowledge, PTAVPs at the ESL are discussed with limited number of studies [8][9][10]. Hence, this study proposes a methodology to easily develop PAVPs into PTAVPs.…”

Temperature gradient‐aware thermal simulator for three‐dimensional integrated circuits

“…Thermal analysis (TA) techniques at architectural level are proposed to predict the temperatures of ICs at the early stages of IC design, through heat transfer analysis using information on ICs, such as floorplan and power consumption [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. When integrated with thermal management techniques such as task migration, power gating, and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling in virtual platforms to co-design, co-simulate, and co-verify software and hardware by the methodology of electronic system-level design at the early stages of IC design [16], the temperatures of the hot spots can effectively be minimised, thus reducing the cost of IC design as well. For better reflecting physical-thermal runaway effect in TA, the thermal effects in temperature-dependent factors (such as leakage power [17,18] and thermal conductivity [19][20][21]) need to be considered.…”