Thermal analysis of 3D functional partitioning for high-performance systems

In this paper, we present a modeling study for the thermal analysis of a functionally partitioned high-performance 3D system-on-chip (SoC). The temperature distributions in a reference 2D-SoC and different stacking configurations of the 3D-SoC are evaluated using a Green ‘s function based semi-analytical thermal modeling method. The modeling study shows that there is only a limited thermal penalty for the 3D functional partitioning compared to the reference 2D-SoC. It is shown that the impact of the different 3D stacking configurations, with different order of the logic and memory layer, is much smaller than the thermal impact of the different cooling solutions that are considered for the 3D-SoC.