IC-ThermBench: An Open, Progressive Benchmark for Generalizable 2.5D/3D-IC Thermal Learning

By David Huang 1Wenkai Yang 2Kuiye Ding 1Haiyang Xin 3
1 University of Technology Sydney, Australia
2 School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China
3 Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

Abstract

Standardized benchmarks are fundamental to reliable progress in AI for EDA, including learning-based thermal modeling. However, existing thermal prediction studies often rely on different datasets, simulators, data splits, preprocessing pipelines, and metrics, while most datasets and implementations remain unavailable, making fair and reproducible comparison difficult. We introduce IC-ThermBench, an open and progressive benchmark that combines established 3D-IC steady-state, transient, and industrial package tasks with a new 50,000-sample 2.5D chiplet extension designed to evaluate progressively broader represented physical variation and cross-package OOD transfer. Five Generalization Scopes cover 3D-IC fixed-design prediction, Within-Family Generalization under layout, material, and boundary-condition variation, and Cross-Package OOD transfer to unseen package systems.

We evaluate eight representative baselines under common data, splits, labels, and metrics. Performance degrades gradually from S2 to S4 as represented physical support broadens, but Cross-Package OOD produces a much sharper degradation: the best RMSE and MAE increase from 1.216 and 0.938~K at S4 to 15.99 and 15.00~K at S5, respectively. With only 10 labeled samples per OOD case, target-domain adaptation reduces the best MAE to 2.60~K. IC-ThermBench further provides a unified generation, training, inference, and evaluation pipeline, enabling reproducible and fair comparison of existing and new thermal predictor. Project site: https://github.com/Day333/ThermalBench.

Keywords: thermal benchmark, public dataset, chiplets, 2.5D/3D integration, neural operators, out-of-distribution generalization

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