Shrunk-2-D: A Physical Design Methodology to Build Commercial-Quality Monolithic 3-D ICs

Monolithic 3-D (M3D) integrated circuits (ICs) are an emerging technology that offer much higher integration densities than previous 3-D IC approaches. In this paper, we present a complete netlist-to-layout design flow to design an M3D block, as well as to integrate 2-D and 3-D blocks into an M3D SoC. This design flow is based on commercial tools built for 2-D ICs, and enhanced with our 3-D specific methodologies. We use the OpenSPARC T2 SoC as a case study, implement it in a 28-nm fully depleted silicon on insulator foundry process, and demonstrate that we can achieve up to 12% and 8% power savings for a single block and SoC, respectively, when compared with their 2-D counterparts implemented using commercial tools.