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arXiv · 2609.06408

Differentiable Partitioning with Placement and Hybrid Bonding Terminal Awareness for Optimized 3D Placement

Liwen Jiang·Xu Shi·Rufeng Xiao·Changhao Yan·Rujun Jiang·Zhiang Wang·Keren Zhu
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Abstract

Research on 3D-ICs physical design has expanded rapidly in recent years. Hybrid bonding-enabled 3D integrated circuits (3D-ICs) offer substantial benefits in interconnect scaling and system integration, yet tier assignment remains challenging because it jointly determines 3D wirelength and hybrid bonding terminal (HBT) assignment. This paper presents a differentiable partitioning framework that directly optimizes placement-aware tier assignment for 3D-ICs through gradient-based optimization. Discrete tier assignment is relaxed to continuous probabilities, and a Dual-Max 3D wirelength model is introduced to capture per-tier half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL). In addition, a terminal-aware cutsize penalty selectively suppresses cross-die nets in HBT-congested regions, and a local balance constraint enforces grid-cell density equilibrium across tiers. Experimental results on OpenROAD benchmarks show that our method reduces D2D HPWL by 2.0% on average over two min-cut baselines and by 12.1% over the state-of-the-art 3D placer. We open-source our partition code with 3D placement flow to support reproducibility.

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Liwen Jiang, Xu Shi, Rufeng Xiao, Changhao Yan, Rujun Jiang, Zhiang Wang, Keren Zhu. 2026-09-06. Differentiable Partitioning with Placement and Hybrid Bonding Terminal Awareness for Optimized 3D Placement. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06408

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