<p dir="ltr">Lab-grown diamond heat spreaders are becoming attractive solutions compared to traditional copper heat spreaders due to their high thermal conductivity and the ability to directly bond them on silicon. Researchers have developed various thermal models and prototypes of lab-grown diamond heat spreaders to evaluate their cooling performance and heat spreading ability. The majority of existing thermal models are built using finite-element method (FEM) based multiphysics simulators such as COMSOL and ANSYS. However, such commercial simulators are computationally expensive and lead to long solution times along with large memory requirements. These limitations make commercial simulators unsuitable for evaluating numerous design alternatives or runtime scenarios for real-world high-performance processors. Because of this modeling challenge, none of the existing works have evaluated the thermal behavior of lab-grown diamond heat spreaders on real-world high-performance processors running realistic application benchmarks. Recently, we have developed a parallel compact thermal simulator, PACT, that is able to carry out fast and accurate steady-state and transient thermal simulations and can be extended to support emerging integration and cooling technologies. In this paper, we use PACT to evaluate the steady-state and transient cooling performance of lab-grown diamond heat spreaders against traditional copper heat spreaders on various real-world high-performance processors (e.g., IBM Power9, PicoSoC, and Intel i7 6950X). By using PACT with architectural performance and power simulators such as Sniper and McPAT, we are able to run transient simulations with realistic benchmarks. Simulation results show that lab-grown diamond heat spreaders achieve maximum and average temperature reductions of 9.44 degC and 6.83 degC when compared to traditional copper heat spreaders, respectively. The maximum steady-state and transient speedup of PACT for various real-world high-performance chips and realistic applications are 228X and 68X when compared to ANSYS, respectively.</p>

Efficient Thermal Analysis of Lab-Grown Diamond Heat Spreaders

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/InterPACK/InterPACK2021/volume/85505

ASME 2021 International Electronic Packaging Technical Conference and Exhibition (InterPACK2021)

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