Mosaic-3C1S: A Low Overhead Crosstalk Suppression Scheme for Rectangular TSV Array

Abstract

The through silicon via (TSV) is one of the important enabling technologies of stacked 3D ICs. However, the crosstalk is generated when signals are transmitted through the closely clustered TSVs due to the coupling effect. The crosstalk avoidance code (CAC) techniques have attracted great concerns in recent years, for the TSV-to-TSV crosstalk deteriorates the signal integrity. Nevertheless, the CAC techniques usually require specific shape of TSV array, e.g. 3×N array. This work proposes a crosstalk suppression scheme combining the CAC method and the static shielding technique, named as Mosaic-3C1S. The proposed scheme is able to be applied to arbitrary rectangular TSV arrays. In the proposed scheme, the 2×2 TSV sub-array which contains three signal TSVs and one shielding TSV, is used as the basic unit to tile the rectangular TSV array. The CAC method is applied to the signal TSVs in the 2×2 sub-arrays, and the raw data are transmitted by the rest boundary TSVs, if any. In order to further reduce the bit overhead, a triangular numeral system based CAC, named as TNS-CAC, is proposed and applied. The simulation results show that the proposed TNS-CAC has advantages on bit overhead and codec area. And the proposed Mosaic-3C1S scheme with TNS-CAC is able to suppress the crosstalk between TSVs to 6C level. The bit overhead of the proposed scheme is between 25% 45%, which is lower than that of the previous CAC methods for TSV arrays for the most cases.