LUTSim: A Look-Up Table-Based Thermal Simulator for 3-D ICs

Abstract

To sustain Moore's law, three-dimensional integrated circuit (3-D IC) is a promising solution to achieve high performance and low cost targets. However, its operating temperature is higher than that of a 2-D IC because of its high power density of stacked dies and ill of heat dissipation capability. Therefore, on-chip thermal effects have become major concerns of 3-D ICs. Utilizing look-up table approach, this paper, LUTSim, provides two thermal simulation engines, I-LUTSim and S-LUTSim, to efficiently calculate the thermal profile of a 3-D IC. I-LUTSim is suitable for full-chip thermal analysis, and S-LUTSim is suited for incremental-thermal updating. With utilizing the prebuilt tables, compared with a commercial tool ANSYS, the absolute error of I-LUTSim is less than 0.29%. Moreover, with negligible loss of accuracy, I-LUTSim can be 38.8 times faster than a well-known matrix solver SuperLU for performing full-chip thermal simulation. Besides, S-LUTSim can be over 1.05 million times faster than SuperLU for adjusting the thermal profile after inserting/removing a through silicon via.