Mitigating the Impact of Process Variation on the Performance of 3-D Integrated Circuits

Three-dimensional die-stacking architectures have been proposed as a promising solution to the increasing interconnect delay that is observed in scaled technologies. Although prior research has extensively evaluated the performance advantage of moving from a 2-D to a 3-D design style, the impact of process parameter variations on 3-D designs has not been studied in detail. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by proposing a variability-aware design framework for fully synchronous (FS) and multiple clock-domain (MCD) 3-D systems. To mitigate the impact of process variations on 3-D designs, we propose the variability-aware 3-D integration strategy for MCD 3-D systems that maximizes the probability of the design meeting specified system performance constraints. The proposed optimization strategy is shown to significantly outperform the FS and MCD 3-D implementations that are conventionally assembled, for example, the MCD designs assembled with the proposed integration strategy provide, on average, 44% and 16.33% higher absolute yield than the FS and conventional MCD designs, respectively, at the 50% yield point of the conventional MCD designs.