Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuit Design, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20

3-D Circuit Architectures

Abstract

Exploiting the advantages of 3-D integration requires the development of novel circuit architectures. A 3-D version of a microprocessor memory system is a primary example of the architectures discussed in this chapter. Major improvements in throughput, power consumption, and cache miss rate are demonstrated. Communication centric architectures, such as a network-on-chip, are also discussed. On-chip networks are an important design paradigm to appease the interconnect bottleneck, where information is communicated among circuits within packets in an Internet-like fashion. The synergy between these two design paradigms, networks-on-chip and 3-D, to significantly improve performance while decreasing the ...