Reliable Power Delivery and Analysis of Power-Supply Noise During Testing in Monolithic 3D ICs

Monolithic 3D (M3D) integration offers significant performance, power, and area benefits. However, the design of a reliable M3D power-delivery network (PDN) is challenging due to high power density and current demand per unit area. We propose a framework to design a reliable PDN for M3D ICs using accurate electrical and reliability models. We leverage genetic programming to explore the design space to optimize the PDN for M3D. We also analyze power-supply noise (PSN) during scan-based testing and compare it with that observed during functional operation. We quantify the impact of PSN during scan-based testing on yield loss. Our results show that the PDN obtained using the proposed approach significantly increases the reliability of at least 40% of the wire segments in the PDN. In addition, the proposed PDN design reduces the worst-case power-supply droop by 50.5% compared to a baseline PDN. The yield loss due to power-supply droop for the proposed design is also significantly lower compared to the baseline.