Publication
Integrated Flow Cell Array (FCA) technology promises to address the power delivery and heat dissipation challenges in three-dimensional Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chips (3D MPSoCs) by providing combined inter-tier liquid cooling and power generation capabilities. In this paper, we present for the first time a design framework to accurately model the temperature-aware power delivery network in 3D MPSoCs, and quantify the effects of FCAs on the voltage drop (IR drop). This framework estimates the power generation variation along FCAs due to voltage and temperature, in the case of uniform and non-uniform powermaps from several real processor traces. Furthermore, we explore different 3D MPSoC configurations to quantify their power delivery requirements. Our results show that FCAs improve the IR-drop with respect to state-of-the-art design methods up to 53% and 30% for dies with a power consumption of 60W and 190W, respectively, while maintaining their peak temperatures below 52°C, and at no additional Through Silicon Via (TSV) area overhead. In addition, as the presence of high power density regions (hotspots) can decrease the FCAs IR- drop reduction by up to 21% with respect to the average value, we present a scalable TSV placement optimization methodology using the proposed framework. This methodology minimizes the IR-drop at hotspots and guarantees an optimal and uniform exploitation of the IR-drop reduction benefits of FCAs.