Vertical DRAM Stacking Expands Thermal Design Space Beyond HBM-on-GPU (imec)

Researchers at imec published “Beyond HBM-on-GPU: Thermal Design Envelope for 3D Volumetric DRAM-on-GPU Integration.”

Summary:
Researchers evaluated a 3D memory architecture that rotates DRAM dies vertically above a GPU and places cooling cavities between them as an alternative to conventional 2.5D HBM and direct-stacked HBM-on-GPU. Package-level thermal simulations examined stack height, memory capacity and organization, cooling-cavity materials, stack orientation, mold insertion, and the addition of a distributed memory-controller/network-on-chip tier.

Find the technical paper here. September 2026

Chen, Yukai, Melina Lofrano, Khakim Akhunov, Jonas Svedas, Arjun Singh, Nathan Laubeuf, Diksha Moolchandani et al. “Beyond HBM-on-GPU: Thermal Design Envelope for 3D Volumetric DRAM-on-GPU Integration.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.24343 (2026).

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