A novel thermal-aware structure of TSV cluster in 3D IC

Although thermal-aware Through Silicon Via (TSV) cluster's behavior has been studied extensively, the structure of TSV cluster, which is also critical for heat dissipation in Three Dimensional Integrated Circuit (3D IC), is ignored. In this paper, a novel structure of TSV cluster is proposed to improve the thermal performance of 3D IC while effectively increasing the area's utilization rate of TSV. Simulation results indicate that the proposed structure benefits both the basic cell and the TSV cluster. Especially, finite element models have been established to study the thermal conduct in the vertical and lateral direction, which shows that the average temperature reduces 0.02% and the peak temperature reduces 0.09% considering the vertical heat dissipation as compared to traditional TSV cluster structure. As for the lateral thermal conduction, the average temperature reduces by 0.005% when the heat source is on the side surface; the peak temperature reduces 0.504% when the heat source is in the middle. Finally, a cluster distribution algorithm is presented to facilitate the implementation of the proposed structure. The results demonstrate that the novel regular triangle structure can effectively alleviate the thermal problem in 3D IC. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.