Yue Zhang was chosen for the 2013 S.C. Sun Best Student Paper Award at the 16th IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference (IITC), held June 13-15, 2013 in Kyoto, Japan. Zhang will be presented with this award at the 2014 IITC, which will take place May 20-23 in San Jose, Calif.

Her winning paper was entitled “Tier-Independent Microfluidic Cooling for Heterogeneous 3D ICs with Nonuniform Power Dissipation.” A doctoral candidate in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Zhang coauthored this work with fellow Ph.D. student Li Zheng and her Ph.D. advisor and ECE Associate Professor Muhannad Bakir.

Cooling is a significant challenge for high-performance and high-power 3D integrated circuits (ICs). In her paper, Zhang and her colleagues present, for the first time, a tier-specific microfluidic cooling scheme using a two-tier multicore processor thermal testbed. The flow rate of each tier is tailored according to its power dissipation. Tier-specific cooling is shown to reduce the pumping power by 37.5% and thus preventing over-cooling and minimizing thermal gradient in a 3D ICs stack.