Access IC Lab Receives Best Paper Award at 2010 VLSI-DAT

The Access IC Lab of NTU Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering (GIEE) recently received the best paper award at 2010 International Symposium on VLSI Design, Automation & Test (VLSI-DAT). NTU GIEE Professor An-Yeu (Andy) Wu together with post-doctoral researcher, Kai-Yuan Jheng, and graduate students, Chih-Hao Chao and Hao-Yu Wang, of the Access IC Lab made advances toward an efficient thermal-traffic co-simulation platform for future three-dimensional (3D) network-on-chip (NoC) system. The awarded paper, “Traffic-Thermal Mutual-Coupling Co-Simulation Platform for Three Dimensional Network-on-Chip,” was selected among 72 technical papers presented in VLSI-DAT. It demonstrated the leading role as well as the research capability of NTU team in the emerging area of 3D IC designs.

Traffic-Thermal Mutual-Coupling Simulation Platform for Three-Dimensional Network-on-Chip

As technology advances, the complexity and delay of interconnection gradually dominate the performance and power consumption in system-on-chip (SoC). NoC and through-silicon-via (TSV) based 3D IC technologies have been proposed to solve the bottleneck of on-chip communication. However, the increasing power density and longer conduction path worsen the heat problem of 3D IC. For the future high-performance systems, the 3D NoC designs must also consider the thermal management issues.

Because the existing non-proprietary NoC design tools do not support coupled thermal simulation, the Access IC Lab developed and integrated a simulation platform to assist the future related researches in 3D NoC. The simulation platform supports the mutual-coupling simulation between network traffic, power, and temperature, helping the designers to efficiently explore the design space and develop suitable run-time thermal management schemes for 3D NoC systems. To assure the accuracy of thermal simulation, the simulation platform is verified with the commercial finite element analysis tool, CFD-RC.

IEEE International Symposium on VLSI-DAT

The International Symposium on VLSI-DAT is one of the global advanced academic conferences on semiconductor technology. Many well-known researchers are invited to present the future directions and technology trends, and publishing papers about the cutting-edge technologies. The 2010 VLSI-DAT has a very high-quality program featuring 3 keynote speeches, 1 joint session on 3D IC, 4 invited talks, 4 tutorials on hot topics and 8 industrial talks. Around 1000 members from the academic, industry, and industrial research attended the 2010 VLSI-DAT. This year, 72 papers, from the U.S., Japan, France, the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, and China, were presented at the VLSI-DAT. The presented papers were called in an open solicitation process, and selected from 159 submitted papers. The best paper award at the 2010 VLSI-DAT is selected among the 72 presented papers by the evaluations of the award committee and the attending guests’ review scores. The selection criteria of the award include the technical contents and writing quality of the paper as well as the quality of the presentation at the symposium. Access IC Lab’s best paper award at the 2010 VLSI-DAT demonstrates a new efficient thermal-traffic co-simulation platform, which takes a giant leap towards the future 3D IC research area.

The research team of Access IC Lab had utilized the simulation platform presented at the 2010 VLSI-DAT to develop a run-time thermal management mechanism for 3D NoC systems. The new research results have been published in the leading conference in the NoC field, the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip, in May 2010.