STEAM: a fast compact thermal model for two-phase cooling of integrated circuits

• Presented at: 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), San Jose. California, USA, November 18-21, 2003
• Published in: Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference On Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), vol. 1, num. 1, p. 256-263
• New York: IEEE/ACM Press, 2013

Two-phase liquid cooling of computer chips via microchannels etched directly on silicon dies is a potential long-term solution to enable continued integration of high-performance multiprocessors. Two-phase cooling refers to the heat removal via evaporation of a refrigerant flowing inside a heat sink. While possessing superior cooling properties, large-scale use of this technology in the industry is limited by the lack of thermal modeling tools that can accurately predict temperatures in a two-phase cooled IC. In this paper, we propose STEAM, a new compact thermal model for 2D/3D ICs with two-phase cooling via silicon microchannels. The accuracy of the STEAM model is validated against measurements from a real two-phase cooled IC test stack reported previously in literature. Temperatures were predicted with an average error as low as 10.2% for uniform heat fluxes and 6.9% for hotspots. Finally, the STEAM model is applied to a realistic 3D multiprocessor system-on-chip (3D MP-SoC) with two-phase cooling to simulate IC temperatures and the refrigerant pumping power, demonstrating the applicability of STEAM in the early-stage design of near-future high-performance computers with two-phase cooling.

Keywords: Two-phase cooling ; CAD ; Thermal modeling ; cooling ; integrated circuits ; 3D ICs ; thermal-aware design ; two-phase cooling ; liquid cooling

Reference

• EPFL-CONF-199298
• View record in Web of Science

Record created on 2014-06-02, modified on 2017-05-10