Report from the 2016 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the leading annual event for professionals across the application design spectrum.

conference

IRT Nanoelec presented its 3DNOC circuit, the second demonstrator chip to be produced under the IRT Nanoelec 3D Integration program, at the 2016 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference held in San Francisco from February 1–4, 2016. The event was attended by 2,900 people.

IRT Nanoelec’s 3DNOC circuit is a logic-on-logic chip made up of a 3D stack of two identical circuits, each of which is a heterogeneous MPSoC (Multi-Processor System-on-Chip) comprising an ARM1176 core, signal processors, hardware accelerators, and heat probes. The robust asynchronous-logic architecture will target 3GPP-LTE telecoms applications. The circuit also has built-in 3D testability and fault-tolerance mechanisms. In terms of the technology, the 70 mm² circuit was fabricated on the STMicroelectronics 65 nm CMOS line using 3D technology developed under the IRT Nanoelec 3D Integration program (TSV middle with a 10 µm diameter and 40 µm pitch; die-to die, face-to-back).

The 3D circuit was verified using 3D design software by Mentor Graphics, a partner of the IRT Nanoelec 3D Integration program. The 3D asynchronous communication links offer transmission speeds of  326 Mbit/s and energy efficiency of 0.66 pJ/bit: the best performance ever achieved by this type of 3D circuit and a substantial leap ahead of the previous state of the art.

A demonstration of the chip was given at the conference to show the adaptability of 3D communication link performance to circuit temperature, a critical effect of this type of 3D circuit. The 3DNOC concept—a complex 3D system with a high-level communication protocol—will be of interest to businesses specializing in servers or networks handling large volumes of data.