A Design Framework for Thermal-Aware Power Delivery Network in 3D MPSoCs with Integrated Flow Cell Arrays

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.