Thermal-aware floorplan schemes for reliable 3D multi-core processors

Abstract

Interconnection delay has become a critical problem in performance improvement of 2D multi-core processors. 3D integration technology can be a good solution for reducing the interconnection delay in multi-core processors. However, the 3D technology magnifies the thermal challenges in multi-core processors. For this reason, the 3D multi-core architecture cannot be practical without proper solutions to the thermal problems. Architecture-level thermal-aware approaches such as dynamic thermal management (DTM) reduce the peak temperature in the processor by sacrificing the performance. On the other hand, thermal-aware design techniques using floorplan lead to peak temperature reduction with minimal performance degradation. This paper investigates how the floorplan schemes handle the thermal problems in 3D multi-core processors. First, we propose two kinds of foorplan schemes for reducing the temperature on integer register and load store queue, respectively. And then, we propose the thermal-aware floorplan schemes by combining these two kinds of floorplan schemes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.