The software was developed in conjunction with Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) and IMEC vzw (Leuven, Belgium) a nanoelectronics research organization. Qualcomm is a partner in IMEC's 3-D integration program.

3D PathFinding extends the Javelin PathFinding methodology and j360 Silicon PathFinder platform to support virtual chip design for co-optimization of system design and 3-D interconnect-packaging technologies, IMEC said.

To support PathFinding for 3-D technologies, the joint team developed a detailed 3-D design flow that provides accurate performance/power/cost estimates for a 3-D stack. With turnaround times of a few hours or days, designers can evaluate and optimize their system and micro-architecture to best exploit 3-D technology options; and silicon process engineers can fine-tune their technology to the system architecture specifications.

"Javelin's Silicon PathFinder 3D allows us to assess the impact of various 3-D interconnect strategies throughout the IC design and fabrication process, and to adapt our technology to our partners' specs," said Pol Marchal, principal scientist of IMEC, in a statement issued by IMEC.

"We validated and used the PathFinding flow on an IMEC 3-D case study to quantify how various implementations of 3-D interconnect technologies resolve the DDR2 DRAM bottleneck in an AVC H.264 encoder to achieve HD1080 quality for smart-phone applications," said Roger Carpenter, chief technology officer of Javelin, in the same statement. "The PathFinding results indicate close to 10 times decrease in dynamic interconnect power of the I/O interface using 3-D interconnect technologies, subsequently allowing the bus-width to increase by 16 times in 3-D implementation, without exceeding the power of the original SIP implementation. This sample design case shows how TSV [through silicon via] technology can remove the bottleneck between processor and memory."

"We believe PathFinding is critical to the success of 3-D integration technology and we are excited to work with Javelin in this area;" said Luc Van den hove, chief operating officer at IMEC, in the same statement.

"Three-dimensional design will allow Qualcomm to offer superior features and performance in our products," said Jim Clifford, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, in the same statement.