A Composable AI-Accelerated Iterative Solver for 3D-IC Thermal Modeling

By Yixing Li, Jiahang Zhou, Zhiyu Zeng, Xin Ai
Cadence Design Systems

Abstract

Accurate thermal analysis of heterogeneous 2.5D/3D-IC packages is essential yet computationally prohibitive. A single full-package FEM simulation can take hours, while AI-based surrogates treat the entire stack as a monolithic prediction target and must be retrained whenever the die count or topology changes. To address this limitation, this work proposes Domain-Decomposed AI-Accelerated Iterative Solver for Thermal Analysis (DAIST), a composable thermal solver that decomposes the global package simulation into block-level subdomain problems, replaces subdomain solvers with neural operators, and couples them through iterative exchanges of interfacial temperature and heat flux. This local-to-global architecture eliminates the topology lock-in of monolithic models: block-level neural operators can be directly reused in unseen package assemblies without retraining. The iterative coupling strategy further provides a controllable accuracy-runtime tradeoff, where the iteration budget can be adjusted to trade accuracy for runtime. Evaluated on a multi-chiplet system and an advanced packaging system, DAIST achieves up to 178× speedup over traditional FEM solvers with mean temperature errors of 0.068% and 0.323%, respectively, while demonstrating cross-topology reuse of block-level models across structurally distinct package assemblies.

Index Terms—3D-IC, thermal simulation, domain decomposition, operator learning

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