Design and analysis of 3D IC-based low power stereo matching processors

This paper presents comprehensive design and analysis results of 3D IC-based low-power stereo matching processors. Our design efforts range from architecture design and verification to RTL-to-GDSII design and sign-off analysis based on GlobalFoundries 130-nm PDK. We conduct comprehensive studies on the area, performance, and power benefits of our 3D IC designs over 2D IC designs. Our 2-tier 3D IC designs attain 43% area, 14% wire length, and 13% power saving over 2D IC designs. We also study a pipeline-based partitioning method shown to be effective at minimizing power consumption and the total number of TSVs while balancing the size of each tier.