Stacking Signal TSV for Thermal Dissipation in Global Routing for 3-D IC

With no further shrinking of device size, 3-D 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 a significant amount of heat per unit volume. We leverage an integrated design methodology of stacked-signal-TSVs to minimize temperature. Based on this structure, a three-stage TSV locating algorithm in global routing is designed. We demonstrate that our results, compared with baseline circuits, have 17% temperature reduction with 3% wiring overhead and no performance loss calculated by 3-D Elmore delay model. Compared with the paper by Cong and Zhang where additional thermal TSVs are inserted, our experimental results have in average 23% less TSVs with the same temperature constraint. Compared with the paper by Pathak and Lim, where movable signal TSVs are relocated to reduce temperature in hotspot regions, our result has 8% more temperature reduction with the same number of signal TSVs.