Special session on “3D chips: Challenges and opportunities”

Encouraged by the significant recent progress of 3D integration technologies, 3D integration has become a spotlight of global semiconductor industry. This certainly provides a new spectrum of opportunities and challenges for system designers and warrants significant rethinking and innovations from system design perspectives. This special session aims to showcase recent research on 3D integrated systems design. It contains four papers: one paper provides an overview of 3D IC design and the associated CAD issues, one paper investigates the use of 3D memory stacking to improve digital signal processor (DSP) performance, one paper presents a 3D on-chip network design strategy with real silicon demonstration, and one paper presents a 3D-enabled resource sharing strategy for improving microprocessor system performance. It is our hope that this diverse special session will encourage much more future research efforts along this important and promising research direction.