Thermal and Electrical Performance of Microfluidically Cooled 3D ICs with Non-uniform Power Dissipation

Compared to the backside air cooling, on-chip microfluidic cooling has shown superior thermal performance due to its reduced thermal dissipation path. The reduced temperature resulting from the on-chip microfluidic cooling can improve the electrical performance in terms of leakage power reduction due to the temperature-leakage coupling effect. In this paper, a coupled power-thermal simulator is used to study the effects of on-chip micropin fin cooling design on both the thermal and electrical performance of 3D ICs running with real application that produce non-uniform power maps. It is found that the leakage power amounts to 55.8% of the dynamic power consumption of the chip. Ambient heat transfer coefficient has very little effect on the thermal and electrical performance while the increasing ambient temperature which affects the fluid temperature strongly degrades the performance. By increasing the pumping power, the maximum temperature and leakage power is decreased. Finally, the effect of pin height, transversal spacing and longitudinal spacing are studied under certain dimension range. Increasing the pin height and transversal spacing could reduce the temperature and leakage power significantly while the effect of longitudinal spacing is not evident.