Three-dimensional-integrated circuits (3D-ICs) bring new issues for power delivery network design because of larger current density and more complicated power delivery paths compared to 2D-IC. The power delivery network consists of power bumps, through-silicon-vias (TSVs), and power wires. IR-drop at each node varies with the number and position of power bumps and TSVs. These three power resources affect IR-drop of 3D-ICs. In this study, the authors propose power delivery network design methodology to optimise power resources wherease IR-drop constraint is satisfied. The simulation results show that the proposed method minimises the number of power bumps and TSVs compared to the conventional method.

Many methodologies for clock mesh networks have been introduced for two‐dimensional integrated circuit clock distribution networks, such as methods to reduce the total wirelength for power consumption and to reduce the clock skew variation through consideration of buffer placement and sizing. In this paper, we present a methodology for clock mesh to reduce both the clock skew and the total wirelength in three‐dimensional integrated circuits. To reduce the total wirelength, we construct a smaller mesh size on a die where the clock source is not directly connected. We also insert through‐silicon vias (TSVs) to distribute the clock signal using an effective clock TSV insertion algorithm, which can reduce the total wirelength on each die. The results of our proposed methods show that the total wirelength was reduced by 12.2%, the clock skew by 16.11%, and the clock skew variation by 11.74%, on average. These advantages are possible through increasing the buffer area by 2.49% on the benchmark circuits.

To reduce interconnect delay and power consumption while improving chip performance, a three‐dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) has been developed with die‐stacking and through‐silicon via (TSV) techniques. The power supply problem is one of the essential challenges in 3D IC design because IR‐drop caused by insufficient supply voltage in a 3D chip reduces the chip performance. In particular, power bumps and TSVs are placed to minimize IR‐drop in a 3D power delivery network. In this paper, we propose a design methodology for 3D power delivery networks to minimize the number of power bumps and TSVs with optimum mesh structure and distribute voltage variation more uniformly by shifting the locations of power bumps and TSVs while satisfying IR‐drop constraint. Simulation results show that our method can reduce the voltage variation by 29.7% on average while reducing the number of power bumps and TSVs by 76.2% and 15.4%, respectively.

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