Coskun Lab Collaborates with Brown University Researchers on Breakthrough in Chip Thermal Simulation
Professor Ayşe Coşkun and co-authors win prestigious TCAD Best Paper Award for research advancements in fast chip thermal simulation
By Lea Rivel & Lea Sabra
BU Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor and Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) Director, Ayşe Coşkun, Professor Sherief Reda of Brown University, three BU alumni Zihao Yuan (CE PhD’22), Prachi Shukla (CE PhD’22), and Sean Nemtzow (CE BS’21), and Sofiane Chetoui (PhD’22 from Brown) were recognized for their outstanding contributions to the field of electronic design automation with the 2024 TCAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award.
The paper, “PACT: An Extensible Parallel Thermal Simulator for Emerging Integration and Cooling Technologies,” was published in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems 41(4), in April 2022. The award was presented at the annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) on June 27 in San Francisco, CA.
The eponymous PACT, a groundbreaking parallel thermal simulator, is designed to help analyze computer chips and cooling technologies. It achieves remarkable speeds by combining compact thermal modeling with parallelization, simultaneously modeling heat and running a large number of calculations. Demonstrated by its use with OpenROAD (an end-to-end open-source silicon compiler), PACT enables smooth amalgamation with circuit design tools.
PACT tackles the fragmentation, currently present in thermal modeling tools, by providing an inclusive solution involving standard-cell to architecture-level evaluations, supporting a variety of chip integration and cooling strategies. Its design ensures seamless adaptation to new cooling technologies, as validated in case studies on liquid, thermoelectric, and two-phase cooling systems.
As demonstrated by experimentation, PACT is a highly precise tool, exhibiting a comparable margin of error to that of other precision tools such as COMSOL. PACT is nearly 200 times faster than methodologies like HotSpot, a popular academic tool, especially when modeling dynamic conditions. PACT has garnered significant interest from industry as a top solution for thermal analysis in modern chip design because of its recognized speed, accuracy, and versatility.
“PACT fills an important gap in chip thermal simulation by providing a fast, accurate, and open-source tool. Especially as chip design moves onto more complex integration technologies, such as 2.5D and 3D integration, existing methods do not provide the necessary speed and ease of use or extensibility. We hope to grow the PACT open-source community into a vibrant ecosystem and enable broader use in both academia and industry,” says Coşkun.
Ayşe Coşkun is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, Director of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE), and leads the Performance and Energy Aware Computing Lab (PEACLab). Her accolades include the IBM Faculty Award in 2020, invited participation in the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in September 2019, and the IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award in 2017.