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ANNOUNCEMENT – COE MS THESIS DEFENSE

Mr. Mohammed Ahmad Khalil, Full-Time COE MS Student, will defend his MS Thesis on Wednesday, December 24, 2014 at 02:00 p.m. in 22-105. His MS thesis title is “OPTIMIZATION OF 3-D VLSI CELL PLACEMENT FOR REDUCTION IN TSVs AND AREA”. His thesis advisor is “Dr. Sadiq Sait Mohamed, Professor, COE Department”. You are cordially invited to attend.

Abstract:  3-Dimensional Integrated Circuit is new technology that overcome many of the 2-Dimensional Integrated Circuit technology limitations especially the long interconnect delay and the large flat area. In this technology multiple dies are stacked vertically leading to a reduced flat area. This technology utilizes the Through Silicon Vias (TSVs) as interconnects for nets that span multiple layers. Like any other technology, 3-Dimensional Integrated Circuit comes with its problems and challenges especially in the physical design process. This work investigated the main challenges that are imposed on this new technology and solved two of the important physical design problems using evolutionary iterative heuristics.

The first problem is the TSV minimization problem under the area balancing constraint. In this work we deployed a modified Simulating annealing algorithm and we adapted the simulation evolution algorithm to solve the TSV optimization problem. The results show that the modified Simulating annealing algorithm outperforms the standard Simulating annealing and the simulation evolution algorithm outperforms both approaches along with the Tabu search algorithm.

The second problem that we handled in this work is the placement problem in 3D standard cell design. In this problem the objective is to minimize both of the number of TSVs and the overall wire-length. To solve this hard problem, we applied a simulation evolution algorithm that incorporates the force directed algorithm in its allocation step; the results show high quality solutions in term of the TSV Count and the total Wire-length.

Refreshment (Tea, cold drink, water and cakes) will be served