3D IC power benefit study under practical design considerations

Despite many predictions that 3D IC is the solution for future low-power electronics, few studies describe how this can happen in real designs. In this paper, we investigate the practical design factors that affect the power consumption of 3D IC using a commercial-grade large-scale benchmark (OpenSPARC T2). In particular, we investigate the impact of power distribution network (PDN) in designer´s perspective. Our study shows that PDN significantly affects several important design metrics in addition to the total power.