Silicon effect-aware full-chip extraction and mitigation of TSV-to-TSV coupling

This paper presents a silicon effect-aware multiTSV model. Through-silicon-via (TSV) depletion region, silicon substrate discharging path and electrical field distribution around TSV neighbor are modeled and studied in full-chip design. Verification with field solver and full-chip TSV-to-TSV coupling analysis in both the worst case and the average case show this model is accurate and efficient. It is found that 3-D nets receive more noise than their 2-D counterparts due to TSV-to-TSV coupling. To alleviate this coupling noise on TSV nets, two new optimization methods are investigated. One way is to utilize guard rings around the victim TSV so as to form a stronger discharging path, an alternative approach is to adopt differential signal transmission to improve noise immunity. These techniques have been implemented on 3-D IC designs with TSVs placed regularly or irregularly. Full-chip analysis results show that our approaches are effective in noise reduction with small area overhead.