Speaker:

Gabriela Nicolescu, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada

Title:

Transient Thermal Simulation for 3D ICs with Through Silicon Vias

Abstract:

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) with through silicon vias (TSVs) have emerged as a very attractive tech- nology for enhancing the performance of semiconductor de- vices. These architectures generate a high and rapidly chang- ing thermal flux. Their design requires accurate transient thermal models, that can consider fast power variations and heterogeneous structures. Several thermal models for 3D ICs have been proposed, either with limited capabilities, or poor simulation performance. This presentation introduces a novel tech- nique based on the Finite Difference Method to efficiently and accurately compute the transient temperature in 3D ICs with TSVs. Our experiments show a 10x speedup versus state-of-the-art models, while maintaining the same level of accuracy. Additionally, we study the impact of the grid res- olution on accuracy and we demonstrate the effect of large TSVs arrays on thermal dissipation.

Bio:

Gabriela Nicolescu is professor at École Polytechnique de Montréal. Since 1999, she has been involved in research on heterogeneous parallel systems. She published five books and she is the author of more than one hundred articles in journals, international conferences and book chapters. In this field, she has numerous Canadian and international industrial and academic collaborations. Her research work explores long term solutions for STMicroelectronics, Mathworks, Canadian Aerospace. She is the co-founder of the Francophone Workshop on Heterogeneous Systems Design (FETCH) and she is actively involved in the organization of numerous international conferences (e.g. general chair for MPSoC 2011 and 2012. RSP 2010, FECTH 2007, executive committee member for DATE 2007, TPC member for DATE 2004-2013, program chair for RSP 2007 and MPSoC 2009, tutorial chair for NEWCAS 2006-2007 and special session chair for ASAP 2007, workshop chair for ISSS/CODES 2009-2012). She won the 2002 award for the best PhD dissertation at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France and was co-author of best paper at ISSS/CODES 2004.