A Passive Equalizer Design for On-Interposer Differential Interconnects in 2.5D/3D ICs

This paper introduce a passive equalizer for compensating the frequency characteristics of on-interposer differential interconnects in TSV-based 3-D ICs. To facilitate the design of the equalizer, we develop a simplified odd-mode circuit model, which only consists of four elements. The simplified model can capture the electrical performance of the differential interconnects quickly and accurately up to 20 GHz. Then, the equalizer parameters are designed by using the time-domain inter-symbol interference (ISI) cancellation method, and then used for extracting the geometrical parameters. The functionality of the passive equalizer is validated in both frequency- and time-domain.