Thermal Implications of Non-Uniform Power in BSPDN-Enabled 2.5D/3D Chiplet-based Systems-in-Package using Nanosheet Technology

Abstract: Advances in nanosheet technologies have significantly increased power densities, exacerbating thermal management challenges in 2.5D/3D chiplet-based Systems-in-Package (SiP). While traditional thermal analyses often employ uniform power maps to simplify computational complexity, this practice neglects localized heating effects, leading to inaccuracies in thermal estimations, especially when comparing power delivery networks (PDN) in 3D integration. This work examines the thermal impact of non-uniform power distributions on SiPs utilizing frontside (FSPDN) and backside (BSPDN) power delivery approaches. Using high-resolution thermal simulations with non-uniform power maps at resolutions down to 5 micrometers, we demonstrate that uniform power assumptions substantially underestimate peak temperatures and fail to reveal critical thermal differences between BSPDN and FSPDN configurations in 3D scenarios. Our results highlight that BSPDN configurations in 3D, although beneficial in simplified uniform scenarios, exhibit pronounced thermal penalties under realistic, localized workloads due to limited lateral heat spreading. These findings emphasize the necessity of adopting fine-grained, workload-aware power maps in early-stage thermal modeling to enable accurate PDN assessment and informed thermal-aware design decisions in advanced nanosheet-based 3D SiP.