Assembling 2-D Blocks Into 3-D Chips

Despite numerous advantages of 3-D integrated circuits (ICs), their commercial success remains limited. In part, this is due to the wide availability of trustworthy intellectual property (IP) blocks developed for 2-D ICs and proven through repeated use. Block-based design reuse is imperative for heterogeneous 3-D ICs where memory, logic, analog, and microelectromechanical systems dies are manufactured at different technology nodes and circuit modules cannot be partitioned among several dies. In this paper, we show how to integrate 2-D IP blocks into 3-D chips without altering their layout. Experiments indicate that the overhead of proposed integration is small, which can help accelerate industry adoption of 3-D integration.