Perspectives and issues in 3D-IC from designers' point of view

Recent progress of through-silicon-via (TSV) process is so impressive that everyone can expect real 3D-IC era. The most valuable advantages of 3D-IC is decreasing interconnects. Although analysis of this advantages has been reported in some specific case study, the general theory for quantitative analysis has not been studied. In some cases, the advantage of 3D-IC has been overestimated and much different from that of real chip designs expected. This paper presents the qualitative analysis of general 3D-IC design especially for sub-65nm CMOS generation from designers' point of view. What is understood from this paper is how important IC-design is for 3D-IC and how to gain a big advantage of 3D-IC.