A parallel iterative approach for efficient full chip thermal analysis

Abstract

Efficient full-chip thermal simulation is among the most challenging problems facing the EDA industry today, especially for modern 3D integrated circuits, due to the huge linear systems resulting from thermal modeling approaches that require unreasonably long computational times. Direct linear solvers are not capable of handling such huge problems and iterative methods are the only feasible approach. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient iterative method with a parallel preconditioned technique that exploits the resources of massively parallel architectures such as Graphic Processor Units (GPUs). Experimental results, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a speedup of 2.2X in CPU execution and a 26.93X speedup in GPU execution over the state of the art iterative method. © 2018 IEEE.