Heterogeneous 3D ICs: Current Status and Future Directions for Physical Design Technologies

One of the advantages of 3D IC technology is its ability to integrate different devices such as CMOS, SRAM, and RRAM, or multiple technology nodes of single or different devices onto a single chip due to the presence of multiple tiers. This ability to create heterogeneous 3D ICs finds a wide range of applications, from improving processor performance by integrating better memory technologies to building compute-in-memory ICs to support advanced machine learning algorithms. This paper discusses the current trends and future directions for the physical design of heterogeneous 3D ICs. We summarize various physical design and optimization flows, integration techniques, and existing academic works on heterogeneous 3D ICs.