Modeling of peak-to-peak switching noise along a vertical chain of power distribution TSV pairs in a 3D stack of ICs interconnected through TSVs

Abstract

On-chip power supply noise has become a bottleneck in 3D ICs as scaling of the supply network impedance has not been kept up with increasing device densities and operating currents with each technology node due to limited wire resources. In this paper we proposed an efficient and accurate model to estimate peak-to-peak switching noise, caused by simultaneous switching of logic loads along a vertical chain of power distribution TSV pairs in a 3D stack of ICs. The proposed model is quite accurate with only 2–3% difference from Ansoft Nexxim4.1 equivalent model. The proposed model is 3–4 times faster than Nexxim4.1 as well as consumes two times less memory as compared to Nexxim4.1equivalent model. We analyzed peak-to-peak switching noise along a vertical chain of power distribution TSV pairs by varying physical dimensions of TSVs and value of decoupling capacitance. We also thoroughly investigated the peak-to-peak noise sensitivity to TSV effective inductance and decoupling capacitance.