A Logic-on-Memory Processor-System Design With Monolithic 3-D Technology

• Published in: IEEE MICRO Vol. 39; no. 6; pp. 38 - 45
• Main Authors: Pentapati, Sai, Zhu, Lingjun, Bamberg, Lennart, Shim, Da Eun, Garcia-Ortiz, Alberto, Lim, Sung Kyu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamitos IEEE 01-11-2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Computer architecture; Delays; Energy conservation; Instruction sets (computers); Integrated circuits; Logic; Microprocessors; RISC; Routing; Systems design; Three-dimensional displays; Transistors; Two dimensional displays; Wires
• ISSN: 0272-1732; 1937-4143
• DOI: 10.1109/MM.2019.2944330

In recent years, the size of transistors has been scaled down to a few nanometers and further shrinking will eventually reach the atomic scale. Monolithic three-dimensional (M3D) ICs use the third dimension for placement and routing, which helps reduce footprint and improve power and performance of circuits without relying on technology shrinking. This article explores the benefits of M3D ICs using OpenPiton, a scalable open-source Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC)-V-based multicore SoC. With a logic-on-memory 3-D integration scheme, we analyze the power and performance benefits of two OpenPiton single-tile systems with smaller and larger memory architectures. The logic-on-memory M3D design shows 36.8% performance improvement compared to the corresponding tile design in 2-D. In addition, at isoperformance, M3D shows 13.5% total power saving.