Design-time performance evaluation of thermal management policies for SRAM and RRAM based 3D MPSoCs

Abstract

3D-ICs hold significant promise for future generation multi processor systems-on-chip due to their potential for increased performance, decreased power, heterogeneous integration, and reduced cost over planar ICs. However, the vertical integration of these structures exacerbates the heat dissipation and run-time thermal management issues. There have been a number of design- and run-time thermal management policies proposed, but few focus on examining overall system performance. Additionally, the heterogeneity of 3D-ICs allows for the integration of novel technologies, such as resistive random access memories (RRAMs), which offer higher density and lower power than traditional CMOS memory technologies. Our work presents a flexible design-time simulation framework to evaluate system performance and thermal profiles of 3D MPSoCs. We utilize this framework to study the effect of three dynamic thermal management policies (air-cooled load balancing, liquid-cooled load balancing, and air-cooled DVFS) on system performance and die temperature for multi-tiered 3D MPSoCs utilizing SRAM and RRAM-based L2 caches. We find that RRAM-based caches lower overall average maximum temperatures by 120 K and 24 K for air and liquid cooling systems, respectively (when compared to SRAM-based caches), at a worst-case performance delay of 47% and best-case delay of 13% for the parallel shared-memory benchmarks studied.