Preliminary validation of entransy-based thermal management for 3D IC

With the development of IC technology, 3 dimensional (3D) architecture (3D IC) has been proposed as a new solution to realize high density and low interconnect delay. Despite of the advance in device performance, 3D IC brings forth many new challenges such as reliability, yield, and so on. Meanwhile, heat dissipation inside a 3D structure becomes more difficult because of the thinner stack, the higher power density and the larger quantity of inter-layer dielectrics, usually with a low thermal conductivity. Thermal management of 3D IC requires suitable optimization parameter to evaluate the heat transfer performance, especially in the automatic thermal-aware routing. This paper examined the effectiveness of the entransy, a new concept in the modern heat transfer, as an evaluation criterion. Numerical results showed that the tendencies of the entransy dissipation and the maximum temperature are consistent, which preliminarily verified its applicability in thermal management of 3D-IC.