Paper to be presented at DATE14 Conference, Dresden, Germany, 27 of March, 2014.

This paper mainly talks about development of a TLM platform to simulate the operation, power and temperature distribution in 3D MPSoCs built using Wide-I/O DRAMs.

Download Paper : sadri_DATE14

Abstract : Heterogeneous 3D integrated systems with Wide-I/O DRAMs are a promising solution to squeeze more functionality and storage bits into an ever decreasing volume. Unfortunately, with 3D stacking, the challenges of high power densities and thermal dissipation are exacerbated. We improve DRAM refresh power by considering the lateral and vertical temperature variations in the 3D structure and adapting the per-DRAM-bank refresh period accordingly. In order to provide proof of our concepts we develop an advanced virtual platform which models the performance, power, and thermal behavior of a 3D-integrated MPSoC with Wide-I/O DRAMs in detail. On this platform we run the Android OS with real-world benchmarks to quantify the advantages of our ideas. We show improvements of 16% in DRAM refresh power due to temperature variation aware bank-wise refresh. Furthermore, two solutions are investigated to speedup system simulations: (1) Adaptive tuning of sampling intervals based on the estimated chip thermal profile, which results in speedups of 2X. (2) Hardware acceleration of thermal simulations using the Maxeler engine, which shows possible speedups of 12X.

Additional material : Please refer to my final 3rd year PhD presentation for slides on this paper.