Investigation and Comparison of Thermal Distribution in Synchronous and Asynchronous 3D ICs

This paper presents an analysis and comparison between synchronous and delay-insensitive asynchronous logic circuits on thermal distributions for investigating novel solutions to the heat dissipation problem in three-dimensional ICs. Due to the spatial and temporal distribution of switching activities in delay-insensitive asynchronous circuits, the thermal density as well as the temperature is largely reduced. Results show that the sample delay-insensitive asynchronous circuit exhibits lower average temperature and more uniform thermal distribution compared to it's synchronous counterpart.