Traffic-thermal mutual-coupling co-simulation platform for three-dimensional Network-on-Chip

Thermal issue is one of the major challenges in the research field of three-dimensional (3D) IC. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been viewed as a practical communication infrastructure for 3D IC. To facilitate such research, an accurate and non-proprietary environment for simulating the NoC traffic and temperature is necessary. In this paper, we present a traffic-thermal mutual-coupling co-simulation platform for 3D NoC. The translation error is eliminated, and therefore our co-simulation has no accuracy loss on mutual coupling. Our simulation results, validated with a commercial tool, show the temperature error of our platform is between -1 and 4 K. The simulation results also show the thermal profile of 3D NoC, in which the temperature is imbalance even under the balanced traffic. Hence, the proposed platform can be used for 3D thermal-aware design, 3D dynamic thermal management technology, and other related researches in the future.