Parallel Thermal Analysis of 3-D Integrated Circuits With Liquid Cooling on CPU-GPU Platforms

• Published in: IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems 2015-03, Vol.23 (3), p.575-579
• Main Authors: Xue-Xin Liu, Kuangya Zhai, Zao Liu, Kai He, Tan, Sheldon X.-D, Wenjian Yu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 3-D-integrated circuit (IC); finite difference; generalized minimum residual method (GMRES); graphic processing unit (GPU) parallel computing; Graphics processing units; Heating; Integrated circuit modeling; Liquid cooling; Mathematical model; Thermal analysis; Vectors
• ISSN: 1063-8210; 1557-9999
• DOI: 10.1109/TVLSI.2014.2309617

In this brief, we propose an efficient parallel finite difference-based thermal simulation algorithm for 3-D-integrated circuits (ICs) using generalized minimum residual method (GMRES) solver on CPU-graphic processing unit (GPU) platforms. First, the new method starts from basic physics-based heat equations to model 3-D-ICs with intertier liquid cooling microchannels and directly solves the resulting partial differential equations. Second, we develop a new parallel GPU-GMRES solver to compute the resulting thermal systems on a CPU-GPU platform. We also explore different preconditioners (implicit and explicit) and study their performances on thermal circuits and other types of matrices. Experimental results show the proposed GPU-GMRES solver can deliver orders of magnitudes speedup over the parallel LU-based solver and up to 4× speedup over CPU-GMRES for both dc and transient thermal analyzes on a number of thermal circuits and other published problems.