Estimating Interconnection Lengths in Three-Dimensional Computer Systems (Special Issue on Synthesis and Verification of Hardware Design)

SUMMARY In computer hardware there is a constant evolution towards smaller transistor sizes. At the same time, more and more transistors are placed on one chip. Both trends make the pin limitation problem worse. Scaling down chip sizes adds to the shortage of available pins while increasing the number of transistors per chip imposes a higher need for chip terminals. The use of three-dimensional systems would alleviate this pin limitation problem. In order to decide whether the beneets of such systems balance the higher processing costs, one must be able to characterize these beneets accurately. This can be done by estimating important layout properties of electronic designs, such as space requirements and interconnection length values. For a two-dimensional placement, Donath found an upper bound for the average interconnection length that follows the trends of experimentally obtained average lengths 1]. Yet, this upper bound deviates from the experimentally obtained value by a factor of approximately 2 which is not suuciently accurate for some applications. In this paper, we rst extend Donath's technique to a three-dimensional placement. We then compute a signiicantly more accurate estimate by taking into account the inherent features of the optimal placement process.