Title:  Investigation of Electrical and Thermal Design Tradeoffs in Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuits

Committee: 

Dr. Bakir, Advisor        

Dr. Davis, Chair

Dr. Naeemi

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to experimentally investigate the impact of 2.5D and 3D integration methodologies on the thermal and electrical performance of functional computing systems. Specifically, 1) A 3D thermal testbed composed of a high-performance GPU and a top-tier die composed of heaters and resistive thermal detectors will be used to investigate the impact of air cooling and microfluidic cooling on 3DIC thermal performance, 2) theoretical modeling of the thermal and electrical impacts of 2.5D and 3D stacking will be performed, making use of the data generated by the GPU thermal testbed, and 3) Additional 3D thermal testbeds will be constructed using high performance FPGAs in order to investigate the tradeoffs between the increased signaling bandwidth the reduced thermal performance in 3D stacks. The proposed experimental work and theoretical modeling tasks will feed into one another in order to develop better and more comprehensive theoretical models of performance and power consumption in tightly-integrated 3D systems.