PACT: An Extensible Parallel Thermal Simulator for Emerging Integration and Cooling Technologies

Thermal analysis is an essential step that enables co-design of the computing system (i.e., integrated circuits and computer architectures) with the cooling system (e.g., heat sink). Existing thermal simulation tools are limited by several major challenges that prevent them from providing fast solutions to large problem sizes that are necessary to conduct standard-cell level thermal analysis or to evaluate new technologies or large chips. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a SPICE-based PArallel Compact Thermal simulator (PACT) that achieves fast and accurate, standard-cell to architecture-level, steady-state and transient parallel thermal simulations. PACT utilizes the advantages of multicore processing (OpenMPI) and includes several solvers to speed up both steady-state and transient simulations. PACT can be easily extended to model a variety of emerging integration and cooling technologies by simply modifying the thermal netlist. In addition, PACT can also be used with popular architecture-level performance and power simulators. In comparison to a state-of-the-art finite-element method (FEM) based simulator (COMSOL), PACT has a maximum error of 2.77% and 3.28% for steady-state and transient thermal simulations, respectively. Compared to a popular compact thermal simulator, HotSpot, PACT demonstrates a speedup of up to 1.83× and 186× for steady-state and transient simulations, respectively. We also show the applicability and extensibility of PACT through modeling emerging integration and cooling technologies, such as monolithic 3D ICs and liquid cooling via microchannels, and full-system simulation integration on a 2.5D system with silicon-photonic network-on-chips (PNoCs).