Toward Fine-Grained Partitioning of Low-Level SRAM Caches for Emerging 3D-IC Designs

Scaling on-chip memory capacity is one of the primary approaches to mitigate memory wall bottlenecks. Various 2.5-D/3-D integration schemes, leveraging novel partitioning, are being actively explored to improve system performance. However, fine-grained functional partitioning of memory macros is not widely reported. As static RAM (SRAM) scaling stagnates with emerging CMOS logic roadmap, we propose a partitioning of low-level (faster access) caches in 3-D using an array under CMOS (AuC) technology paradigm. Our study focuses on partitioning and optimization of SRAM bit-cells and peripheral circuits, enabling heterogeneous integration, achieving up to 12% higher operating frequency with 50% leakage power reduction in the memory macros. Applied on a 64-bit mobile system-on-chip (SoC) CPU core, we achieve up to 60% higher energy efficiency compared with 2-D baseline and 14% increase in operating frequency compared with standard memory-on-logic 3-D partitioning scheme.