Performance evaluation of air-gap-based coaxial RF TSV for 3D NoC

Abstract

In this paper, a novel air-gap-based coaxial Through Silicon Via (TSV) was proposed for on-chip RF interconnect, to fill up the increasing bandwidth gap between the demand and supply according for the 2007 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. Based on earlier work, the expressions of characteristic impedance, attenuation and bandwidth have been proposed. Consequently, we assume an 80 multi-core 3D Network-on-Chip (NoC) system with Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) modulation, to evaluate energy per bit and area per Gbps of the proposed air-gap-based coaxial TSV. The result indicates that the energy dissipation and area consumption of the proposed one are 40~50% and 10% better than the conventional dielectric RF TSV.