Fast thermal analysis on GPU for 3D-ICs with integrated microchannel cooling

While effective thermal management for 3D-ICs is becoming increasingly challenging due to the ever increasing power density and chip design complexity, traditional heat sinks are expected to quickly reach their limits for meeting the cooling needs of 3D-ICs. Alternatively, integrated liquid-cooled microchannel heat sink becomes one of the most effective solutions. For the first time, we present fast GPU-based thermal simulation methods for 3D-ICs with integrated microchannel cooling. Based on the physical heat dissipation paths of 3D-ICs with integrated microchannels, we propose novel preconditioned iterative methods that can be efficiently accelerated on GPU\u27s massively parallel computing platforms. Unlike the CPU-based solver development environment in which many existing sophisticated numerical simulation methods (matrix solvers) can be readily adopted and implemented, GPU-based thermal simulation demands more efforts in the algorithm and data structure design phase, and requires careful consideration of GPU\u27s thread/memory organizations, data access/communication patterns, arithmetic intensity, as well as the hardware occupancies. As shown in various experimental results, our GPU-based 3D thermal simulation solvers can achieve up to 360X speedups over the best available direct solvers and more than 35X speedups compared with the CPU-based iterative solvers, without loss of accuracy. ©2010 IEEE