Stacking signal TSV for thermal dissipation in global routing for 3D IC

Abstract

With no further shrink of device size, three dimensional (3D) chip stacking by Through-Silicon-VIA (TSV) has been identified as an effective way to achieve better performance in speed and power. However, such solution inevitably encounters challenges in thermal dissipation since stacked dies generate significant amount of heat per unit volume. We leverage an integrated architecture of stacked-signal-TSVs to minimize temperature with small wiring overhead. Based on the structure of stacked signal TSV, a two-stage TSV locating algorithm in global routing is designed. By this TSV locating algorithm, we demonstrate that our stacking signal TSV structure is able to reduce 17% temperature with 4% wiring overhead and 3% performance loss calculated by 3D Elmore delay model. Compared to a previous work by Cong and Zhang [1] where additional thermal TSVs are inserted, our experimental results have in average 23% less TSVs than Cong and Zhang's [1] with the same temperature constraint.