Design, CAD and technology challenges for future processors: 3D perspectives

摘要

Technology scaling has provided the semiconductor industry a recipe to successfully meet the application demands for performance for over three decades. This computational capacity was further fueled by the success of circuit and architecture-level innovation, which provided performance improvement in each processor generation. However, future processor designs face a number of key challenges in sustaining the growth trends. The dawn of the 22nm node, and beyond, marks an era of new trends and challenges; where the cost and complexity associated with each technology node is increasing at much faster rate than the device performance gains. Novel tools and design methodologies are needed to not only compensate for these challenges but also to leverage emerging technologies to achieve the desired performance in future processor architectures. Technology alternatives such as 3D integration have attracted significant interest as an additional way of sustaining the density scaling and performance growth.