Thermal Performance Analysis of Carbon Materials Based TSV in Three Dimensional Integrated Circuits

This paper applies the carbon materials (i.e., SWCNT, MWCNT, and GNR) as new prospective filler materials of through silicon vias (TSV) for replacing the conventional copper (Cu) to improve the thermal performance of three-dimensional integrated circuits (3-D ICs). The thermal performance of 3-D ICs with integrated TSVs is investigated and the corresponding numerical calculation model is established in this work. Moreover, the thermal performance of 3-D ICs with integrated carbon materials based TSV is investigated by applying our proposed numerical calculation model. The calculation results illustrate that the 3D-ICs with integrated SWCNT based TSV have a greater thermal performance, as compared with the 3-D ICs integrated other materials (i.e., MWCNT, GNR, and Cu) based TSV. Furthermore, it is also manifested that the temperature of die layer in 3-D ICs can be reduced by increasing the thermal conductivity of package and heat sink, by increasing the radius of TSV and decreasing the spacing between TSV. In addition, it is found that the results of our proposed numerical calculation model are fairly consistent with COMSOL simulation and the maximum relative error for them is not exceeding 2%. The proposed new filler materials in this work has many potential applications in improving the heat dissipation performance of 3-D ICs, meanwhile the presented numerical calculation model can provide guidelines for thermal design of 3-D ICs.