An Enhancement of Crosstalk Avoidance Code Based on Fibonacci Numeral System for Through Silicon Vias

Abstract

Through silicon vias (TSVs) play an important role as the vertical electrical connections in 3-D stacked integrated circuits. However, the closely clustered TSVs suffer from the crosstalk noise between the neighboring TSVs, and result in the extra delay and the deterioration of signal integrity. For a 3 × 3 TSV array, the severity of crosstalk noise in the center victim TSV is classified into 11 levels, which is defined as 0C to 10C from low noise to high noise, depending on the combinations of the digital patterns applied to the TSV array. An enhanced code based on the Fibonacci number system (FNS) to suppress the crosstalk noise below 6C level is proposed, in which both the redundancy of numbers and the nonuniqueness of Fibonacci-based binary codeword are utilized to search the proper codeword. Experimental results show that the proposed technique decreases about 22% latency of TSVs comparing with the worst crosstalk cases. This technique is applicable in the large-scale TSV array for it has a quasi-linear hardware overhead, and its system overhead is less than that of the 3-D 4-LAT counterpart if the data width is greater than 18, and it has good usability for it consumes less power per TSV and achieves lower bit error rate at the interested frequency range comparing with that of the original FNS coding technique.