3D Chips can be cool: Thermal study of VeSFET-based ICs

Thermal management constitutes a huge challenge for CMOS or FinFET-based circuits, especially when chips go 3D. VeSFET provides an alternative thermal-friendly design choice. Device simulations show that temperature increase due to self-heating is very small for VeSFET transistors. At chip level, VeSFET-based 2-D and 3-D chips not only have much lower power density, but also have better vertical thermal conductivity than their CMOS counterparts. Peak temperature of a 10-die VeSFET chip is only 18K higher than ambient temperature. Temperature increase of a working 10-die 3-D VeSFET chip is 70% less than that of a similar CMOS configuration.