3D thermal-aware floorplanner using a MILP approximation

One of the most important concerns in 3D technology is heat removal. In this paper we propose a 3D thermal-aware floorplanner. Our contributions include: (1) a novel multi-objective formulation to consider the thermal and performance constraints in the optimization approach; (2) an efficient Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) representation of the floorplanning model; and (3) a smooth integration of the MILP model with an accurate thermal modelling of the architecture. The experimental results for several realistic 3D stacks based on the Niagara system show promising improvements of the main thermal metrics, with a reduced overhead in the wire length of the system.