An Extension of A Temperature Modeling Tool HotSpot 6.0 for Castle-of-Chips Stacking

Abstract

HotSpot is an open source analysis tool for estimating temperature of both 2D and 3D chip stacks. It counts both the primary path of the heat transfer through the heat-sink and the secondary path through the print circuit board. It can estimate the temperature of chips. However, HotSpot-6.0 cannot treat a complicated chip stacking such as the castle of chips (CoC) with inductive wireless coupling through-chip interface (TCI). Therefore, in this report we have extended the HotSpot simulator and updated it in order to evaluate CoC. Compared to the original HotSpot, the extended version of HotSpot had an average execution time increase of about 6% when evaluating the same vertical stacking. The execution time of CoC with the same number of chips is shorter than when executing vertical stacking, but when the number of layers is the same, the execution time is almost equal. Moreover, our design considers high productivity, e.g. it can easily set air cooling, oil cooling, water cooling evaluation and chip rotation setting.