Thermal modeling of three-dimensional integrated circuits considering the thermal removal capability of different TSVs

In this paper, a thorough comparison of the heat removal capability of different types of through silicon vias (TSVs) for three-dimensional ICs is presented. It is shown that power TSVs with the associated power delivery network (PDN) has significantly better heat removal capability than the other types of TSVs. An accurate and efficient thermal simulation methodology is then proposed by incorporating an accurate heat removal model of the PTSVs and PDN. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed methodology is close to that of detailed 3-D finite volume based heat solver, while the computational effort is much lower.