Macro-3D: A Physical Design Methodology for Face-to-Face-Stacked Heterogeneous 3D ICs

Memory-on-logic and sensor-on-logic face-to-face stacking are emerging design approaches that promise a significant increase in the performance of modern systems-on-chip at reasonable costs. In this work, a netlist-to-layout design flow for such heterogeneous 3D systems is proposed. The proposed technique overcomes the severe limitations of existing 3D physical design methodologies. A RISC-V-based multi-core system, implemented in a commercial technology, is used as a case study to evaluate the proposed design flow. The case study is performed for modern/large and small cache sizes to show the superiority of the proposed methodology for a broad set of systems. While previous 3D design flows do not show to optimize performance against 2D baseline designs for processor systems with a significant memory area occupation, the proposed flow shows a performance and power improvement by 20.4–28.2% and 3.2–3.8%, respectively.