Résumé
The increasing power density of modern multi-core processors using deep nano-scale technologies has entailed severe thermal issues for such chips. Indeed, industry’s heterogeneous chip design trends exacerbate transient non-uniform thermal hotspots in next-generation processors. Different cooling solutions are coming into play to alleviate this situation, such as liquid, evaporative, or thermoelectric cooling, among others. Hence, a new generation of thermal simulators with unprecedented flexibility is required to include such technologies in the modeling of nano-scale IC design technologies. This work presents 3D-ICE 3.1, the first thermal simulator designed for fully customized nonuniform modeling and accurate co-simulation with different heat dissipation systems.