A Study of 3-D Power Delivery Networks With Multiple Clock Domains

Abstract

Ongoing advancements in 3-D manufacturing are enabling 3-D ICs to contain several processing cores, hardware accelerators, and dedicated peripherals. Most of these functional units operate with independent clock frequencies for power management reasons or simply for being hard intellectual properties. Thus, as diverse and heterogeneous circuits can be implemented on a 3-D IC, it also leads to the use of multiple clock domains. While these domains allow many functional units to run in parallel to exploit 3-D potentials, they also introduce power delivery challenges. This paper proposes an efficient analysis for assessing the worst case power supply noise on 3-D power delivery networks (PDNs) with multiple clock domains. This paper discusses power and thermal integrity issues that arise from multiple clock domains that share the same 3-D global PDN. We first examine power supply noise distribution on each tier and investigate scenarios that lead to worst case noise. Thermal analyses are also performed and heat distribution among clock domains and tiers is examined. In addition, the impact of clock domain structure and frequency on the overall power supply noise and temperature distribution has been quantified. Experiments show that the multiclock domains can induce excessive noise and the through-silicon-vias can contribute to power supply noise and heat transfer among tiers. This paper presents a summary of guidelines for modeling, analyzing, and exploring a design of reliable 3-D PDNs with multiple clock domains.