3D serial TSV link for low-power chip-to-chip communication

3D-ICs based on TSV technology provide high bandwidth inter-chip connections. The drawback is that most of the existing TSVs consume a large amount of silicon real estate. We present circuit-level design and analysis of area efficient, low power, high-data-rate 3D serial TSV links. A design space exploration is performed and trade-offs in terms of area, power and performance are presented. Circuit simulations of RC-extracted layouts in 40nm CMOS-technology reveals that 8:1 serialization efficiently balances area consumption and energy efficiency. Using 10μm-diameter TSV technology, an 8Gb/s serial link consumes only 84fJ/bit with 10X area reduction over 8b parallel bus.