3D-Carbon: An Analytical Carbon Modeling Tool for 3D and 2.5D Integrated Circuits

Environmental sustainability, driven by concerns about climate change, resource depletion, and pollution at local and global levels, poses an existential threat to Integrated Circuits (ICs) throughout their entire life cycle, particularly in manufacturing and usage. At the same time, with the slowing down of Moore's Law, ICs with advanced 3D and 2.5D integration technologies have emerged as promising and scalable solutions to meet the growing computational power demands. However, there is a distinct lack of carbon modeling tools specific to 3D and 2.5D ICs that can provide early-stage insights into their carbon footprint to enable sustainability-driven design space exploration. To address this, we propose 3D-Carbon, a first-of-its-kind analytical carbon modeling tool designed to quantify the carbon emissions of commercial-grade 3D and 2.5D ICs across their life cycle. With 3D-Carbon, we can predict the embodied carbon emissions associated with manufacturing without requiring precise knowledge of manufacturing parameters and estimate the operational carbon emissions owing to energy consumption during usage through surveyed parameters or third-party energy estimation plug-ins. Through several case studies, we demonstrate the valuable insights and broad applicability of 3D-Carbon. We believe that 3D-Carbon lays the initial foundation for future innovations in developing environmentally sustainable 3D and 2.5D ICs. The code and collected parameters for 3D-Carbon are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/3D-Carbon-9D5B/.