Development of Thermal Design and Analysis Methodologies for Emerging Integrated Systems

Thermal issues have become crucial to the design process of modern integrated systems due to the increasingly high transistor integration densities (e.g., multi-, many-core systems). The advent of enhanced devices, such as FinFETs and FDSOI and innovative integration approaches, such as multi-tier (2.5-D and 3-D) stacking of chips, has further accentuated the importance of thermal issues. As a result of this situation, thermal design has become part of the circuit design process in the past few years at several levels of the design abstraction (for example from the physical level all the way to the system level).

To develop thermal design methodologies and algorithms, accurate and fast thermal analysis is required to evaluate the effectiveness of the investigated thermal design techniques. We have developed an in-house tool that supports the analysis of complex integrated systems including the surroundings of a circuit (e.g., packaging and cooling), which are essential in realistically determining the thermal behaviour of circuits.

This PhD project offers an exciting opportunity to work primarily in developing new ideas that will lead to thermal-aware design of integrated circuits and systems at the physical and/or architecture level. New thermal management techniques can be developed by utilizing the in-house tool. Alternatively the PhD student can advance the tool features by developing novel numerical techniques and/or code parallelization and optimization methods.

The distinct characteristic of this project is that it provides the opportunity to build on understanding and developing skills relating both to circuit design and design automation. Thus, the project requires that the interested student has both an understanding of circuits as well as sufficient programming skills. The mixed nature of this project allows for properly adapting the aimed research objectives based on the background and knowledge of the student. For the same reason, the project will greatly assist the researcher to develop highly competitive skills for employment in the broader semiconductors and electronics industry.