3D thermal-aware floorplanner using a MOEA approximation

Two of the major concerns in 3D stacked technology are heat removal and power density distribution. In our work, we propose a novel 3D thermal-aware floorplanner. Our contributions include: 1. A novel multi-objective formulation to consider the thermal and performance constraints in the optimization approach. 2. Two efficient Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) for the representation of the floorplanning model and for the optimization of thermal parameters and wire length. 3. A smooth integration of the MOEA model with an accurate thermal modeling of the architecture. The experimental work is conducted for two realistic many-core single-chip architectures: an homogeneous system resembling INTEL's SCC, and an improved heterogeneous setup. The results show promising improvements of the mean and peak temperature, as well as the thermal gradient, with a reduced overhead in the wire length of the system. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.