Thermal-Aware Floorplanning and TSV-Planning for Mixed-Type Modules in a Fixed-Outline 3-D IC

High temperature or temperature nonuniformity has become a serious threat to performance and reliability of high-performance integrated circuits (ICs). Since the temperature in a 3-D IC is mainly determined by a power distribution across tiers, this article proposes a novel method to allocate modules to tiers while exploring a better power distribution according to the hyperparameter optimization technique. In addition, we integrate the sub-3-D thermal mask into the analytical formulation to interleave high power consumption modules in contiguous tiers during distributing modules over placement regions so that it is possible to insert through-silicon vias (TSVs) around high power modules to further reduce the temperature at a later stage. Since the temperature in a tier will be changed every time the locations of TSVs in its lower tier are moved, we also propose a procedure to update the temperature map before refining locations of TSVs. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed methodology can effectively reduce the temperature of a 3-D IC with a slight increase in the wirelength. Moreover, its runtime is quite fast.