Architecture, Dataflow and Physical Design Implications of 3D-ICs for DNN-Accelerators

Jan Moritz Joseph1, Ananda Samajdar2, Lingjun Zhu2, Rainer Leupers1, Sung Kyu Lim3, Thilo Pionteck4, Tushar Krishna2
1RWTH Aachen University, 2Georgia Institute of Technology, 3Georgia Tech, 4Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg


Abstract

The everlasting demand for higher computing power for deep neural networks (DNNs) drives the development of parallel computing architectures. 3D integration, in which chips are integrated and connected vertically, can further increase performance because it introduces another level of spatial parallelism. Therefore, we analyze dataflows, performance, area, power and temperature of such 3D-DNN-accelerators. Monolithic and TSV-based stacked 3D-ICs are compared against 2D-ICs. We identify workload properties and architectural parameters for efficient 3D-ICs and achieve up to 9.14x speedup of 3D vs. 2D. We discuss area-performance trade-offs. We demonstrate applicability as the 3D-IC draws similar power as 2D-ICs and is not thermal limited.