Power Analysis Approach for NoC-based Homogeneous Stacked 3D ICs

Abstract

Low-power consumption in three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D IC) design is becoming an important concern that cannot be neglected. The multiple layers/dies are stacked in 3D IC and communicate with each other through-silicon-vias (TSVs) to work as a single device in order to achieve high performance with minimum power dissipation. This paper demonstrates high-level power modeling approach for the power estimation of homogenous integration of Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based mesh architecture in 3D IC design. The preliminary experimental work of power model is divided into two major parts of the design. The first part estimates the power of NoC architecture on each stack separately and the second estimates the power dissipation of the uniformly distributed TSVs and input/output (I/O) pads. The model uses a linear function to estimate the average power dissipation. For an entire IC design, the average power is extracted by simple addition of all power estimation results of the model. The design is operated with multiple frequencies to find the most appropriate frequency to minimize power dissipation. In experiments, the average maximum error is estimated 18.03%.