Abstract

Through-silicon-vias (TSVs) can potentially be used to implement inductors in 3-D integrated systems for minimal footprint and large inductance. However, different from conventional 2-D spiral inductors, TSV inductors are fully buried in the lossy substrate, thus suffering from low quality factors. In this paper, we systematically examine how various process and design parameters affect their performance. A few interesting phenomena that are unique to TSV inductors are observed. We then propose a novel shield mechanism utilizing the microchannel, a technique conventionally used for heat removal, to reduce the substrate loss. The technique increases the quality factor and inductance of the TSV inductor by up to 21x and 17x, respectively. Finally, since full-wave simulations of 3-D structures are time-consuming, we develop a set of compressed sensing-based design strategies for microchannel-shielded TSV inductors, which only requires a minimal number of simulations. It enables us to implement microchannel-shielded TSV inductors of up to 5.44x reduced area compared with spiral inductors of the same design specs (quality factor, inductance, and frequency). To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first in-depth study on TSV inductors to make them practical for high-frequency applications. We hope our study shall point out a new and exciting research direction for 3-D integrated circuit designers.

Department(s)

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

microchannel; Three-dimensional integrated circuit (3-D IC); through-silicon-via (TSV) inductors

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1063-8210

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jul 2015

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