Thermal-Centric Design Methodologies for Monolithic 3D Integrated Circuits

Tuesday 15/10 at 12:00pm

The talk was delivered on time and was well received by a mixed audience including senior undergraduate students as well as graduate students including both MSc students and PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty members from three different Departments of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The speaker discussed the pressing issues in semiconductor industry that has led to the exploration of 3D technologies. He also introduced monolithic 3D (M3D) ICs and presented how this technology can achieve unprecedented device and interconnect density due to sequential fabrication of multiple device tiers and vertical interconnects with diameters in the range of tens of nanometers. Prof Salman went on to discuss the unique thermal characteristics of M3D ICs, describing the major differences with through silicon via (TSV) based 3D ICs. These results rely on thermal simulations of M3D systems by leveraging a process design kit and cell library that we developed. He also presented a thermal-centric design optimization methodology for M3D integrated deep neural network (DNN) accelerators and demonstrated how technology-dataflow co-design can achieve an order of magnitude improvement in inference per second per Watt per footprint. The talk concluded with some important take away messages and a round of questions followed the talk. The feedback from the audience was the most positive and all participants stated that they enjoyed the talk as well as the quality and organization of the presented material. In a nutshell, the talk was at the right level for the audience to follow the talk while at the same time offering stimuli for further investigation to interested students and researchers.