Modeling and Design of Dual-Purpose MIV in Monolithic 3D IC

Transistor-level monolithic three-dimensional integrated circuit (M3D-IC) technology potential is compromised with the silicon footprint overhead caused by metal inter-layer via (MIV). To address this issue, we present a dual-purpose MIV-device utilization where MIV serves two purposes: 1. interconnect and 2. device terminal. A detailed study of the proposed MIV-devices specifically MIV-capacitor and MIV-transistor is performed and a strategy to extract level-3 Spice models is presented in this paper. Simulation results suggest that the basic logic gates designed with the opportunistic utilization of MIV-devices reduce the substrate utilization by up to 22% compared with the conventional transistor-level implementation in M3D-IC technology.