Electromigration-aware placement for 3D-ICs

This paper presents a novel technique and algorithm for chip-scale electromigration (EM) aware 3D placement. A simple TSV's EM objective function is used, providing a computationally efficient way to represent TSV EM other than the finite-element-method (FEM) based simulation. Considering TSV's EM is mutually influenced by neighboring TSVs (due to TSV EM's dependence on TSV-induced thermal mechanical stress) and strongly affected by temperature, iterative optimizations are performed to obtain the optimal TSV's distribution and a desired TSV's temperature. Finally using a compact thermal model and simulated annealing, all logic gates are placed such that the desired temperature profile is reached. Results show that compared with a conventional wirelength centered 3D placer, our design achieves 3.41x longer mean-time-to-failure (MTTF), with only 3% wirelength overhead.