Chain-Based Approach for Fast Through-Silicon-Via Coupling Delay Estimation

A chain-based coupling delay estimation method for through-silicon-vias (TSVs) in 3-D integrated circuits is proposed. Existing works target the worst case scenarios and this leads to inaccurate TSV coupling delay estimations, as the worst case may not occur during normal operation. The proposed method calculates the TSV coupling delay using simulation-based switching data. In addition, our TSV chain method allows us to capture the effects of nonneighboring TSVs accurately. Our simulations show that the error introduced by our method without using HSPICE is less than 10 ps even in TSV-crowded regions.