A criticality-driven microarchitectural three dimensional (3D) floorplanner

As technology scales, interconnect delays begin to dominate the performance of modern microprocessors. The ability to reduce the length of global wires has become an important design constraint, however only a subset of those global wires is critical for determining performance. The introduction of three-dimensional (3D) ICs has created the opportunity to reduce global wiring lengths and shorter interconnect delays through the intelligent placement of functional blocks. In this paper, a floorplanner for 3D chips is proposed that organizes functional blocks according to critical microarchitectural communication paths. The floorplanner identifies the potential triggers, in the form of feedback delays, which are responsible for the largest communication costs and places the contributing functional blocks in such a way that those costs are minimized. With our criticality driven 3D placement there is an average IPC improvement of 22% over 2D placement. Over criticality unaware 3D placement, criticality driven 3D placement shows an average IPC improvement of 8%.