Multiple voltage-supplies in TSV-based three-dimensional (3D) power distribution networks

Abstract

It is important to understand how to deliver power into 3D heterogeneous systems, which require different power supplies for different components (e.g., digital, analog, mixed-signal, MEMS parts). This paper reports on a study for a simplified case, where the two power supplies with different voltage levels are uniformly distributed through a TSV-based 3D system. In addition to intrinsic voltage losses along the interconnections, we investigated for the first time the power noises due to electrical couplings between the multiple power supplies. We evaluated the through-silicon-via (TSV)-based 3D power delivery networks by combining the electromagnetic (EM) and SPICE simulations. With this hybrid approach, we first partitioned the 3D system into a number of elements, extracted the RLGC parasitics for each decomposed physical element, and imported them into an assembled system-level equivalent circuit to characterize the 3D power distribution networks. © 2012 IEEE.