Traffic-Thermal Mutual-Coupling Co-Simulation Platform for Three-Dimensional Network-on-Chip

Thermal issue is one of the major challenges in the research field of three-dimensional (3D) IC. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been viewed as a practical communication infrastructure for 3D IC. To facilitate such research, an accurate and non-proprietary environment for simulating the NoC traffic and temperature is necessary. In this paper, we present a traffic-thermal mutual-coupling co-simulation platform for 3D NoC. The translation error is eliminated, and there-fore our co-simulation has no accuracy loss on mutual coupling. Our simulation results, validated with a commercial tool, show the tem-perature error of our platform is between-1 and 4 K. The simulation results also show the thermal profile of 3D NoC, in which the tem-perature is imbalance even under the balanced traffic. Hence, the proposed platform can be used for 3D thermal-aware design, 3D dynamic thermal management technology, and other related re-searches in the future. 1