Thermal sensor allocation for 3DICs using three dimensional thermal sensors

Stacking active layers leads to increased power density and overall higher temperatures in a three dimensional integrated circuit (3DIC). Thermal sensors are therefore crucial for run-time thermal management of 3DICs. A thermal sensor allocation method customized for 3DICs that utilizes ring oscillator based 3D sensors is introduced in this paper. A new 3D thermal map modeling method that facilitates efficient and very fast analyses is embodied in this thermal sensor distribution algorithm. Our results indicate that for a 4-layer stacked 3DIC, consisting of two layers of quad-core processors and one layer of L2 cache and one layer of main memory, less than 3.58% in maximum sensor reading error can be accomplished with a 53× speedup in the thermal evaluation time and thermal sensor distribution algorithm implementation.