Stress less, innovate more: ensuring 3D IC reliability with Siemens Calibre 3DStress

By Design With Calibre

The march toward 3D ICs and advanced packaging brings unrivaled performance and integration opportunities—but it also raises new reliability challenges for semiconductor design teams. Increasingly complex stacks, heterogeneous dies and intricate assembly flows all contribute to thermo-mechanical and material-driven stress that, if unchecked, can compromise device and package reliability.

Enter Siemens Calibre 3DStress: an innovative, automated solution built to help design teams uncover, understand, and manage stress-induced reliability risks in 3D ICs and chiplet-based architectures. With the right analysis tools, you can focus on innovation—without unwanted surprises as your project moves toward tapeout. Calibre 3DStress is a key part of the Calibre multi-physics platform that includes Calibre 3DThermal, Calibre 3DStack and Calibre 3DPERC.

Why modern 3D ICs require rigorous stress analysis

The move to 3D integration and chiplet designs is transforming the semiconductor landscape. Tighter footprints and performance gains are within reach, but so are new challenges: every component, layer, and assembly stage can introduce complex, multi-physics stress patterns. Effects such as die warpage, cracking, delamination and even variations in electrical characteristics often result from subtle mechanical forces distributed throughout the stack. To learn more about the effects of thermo-mechanical stress, download our recent technical paper, Thermo-mechanical stress on active chiplets in a 3D IC heterogeneous package assembly

Traditional 2D sign-off tools, and even many package-level simulators, rarely provide enough insight into how these stresses play out at both the device and assembly level. The result? Risk of failure modes or degraded reliability only discovered late in development or, worse, after product manufacture.

Alt text: Illustration showing a 3D IC package with multiple stacked dies and chiplets, with callouts highlighting progressive views from the package to a single chip and down to device level. — Figure 1. Multi-scale stress analysis: seeing the full picture, from package to die to individual devices, is essential for robust 3D IC verification.

The limits of legacy analysis in the 3D IC era

Historically, mechanical analysis for ICs focused on the package level using simplified representations—often treating the chip as a single, solid block. This may have been sufficient for earlier, less complex designs, but does not reflect the reality of modern integration. Simplifying away detailed chip structure means critical peaks, valleys, and localized effects often go undetected.

Manual material input adds another layer of challenge, as today’s assemblies consist of diverse materials with subtle but significant interactive behaviors. The combination of more dies, new interposers, fine-scale bumps and advanced substrates makes capturing the complete assembly context nearly impossible without dedicated, automated tools.

Simulation run times can also become a bottleneck, with inefficient algorithms hampering critical project milestones. And even when results are available, legacy visualization tools can make it difficult to identify and address specific problem areas with the granularity needed for design closure.

Calibre 3DStress: holistic, automated, and efficient stress evaluation

Siemens Calibre 3DStress was developed to address these exact gaps. By combining automated extraction of material properties and layout data from your process and package files, detailed multi-scale modeling and a highly scalable solver, Calibre 3DStress is built for the realities of 3D IC and advanced packaging projects. It delivers actionable results quickly, enabling both rapid prototyping and dependable final sign-off.

Automated context capture: Minimal manual intervention means reduced errors and consistent simulation setup, even for the most sophisticated assemblies.
Robust FEA-based modeling: Complete physical context, including interfaces and detailed device-level effects, is accounted for—yielding a true picture of stress distribution.
Intuitive, actionable output: High-resolution heatmaps and overlays in Calibre RVE or other supported viewers allow teams to engage directly with their results and pinpoint effective mitigation options.

Alttext: A screenshot of the 3D stress analysis visualization, highlighting layers, selectable views (e.g., stress component, region cross-section), and overlays with layout or package structures.) — Figure 2. Interactive stress visualization example: Calibre DESIGNrev display of device level stress results for two cells show heatmap for stress in x direction. All properties can be highlighted interactively as shown in the Calibre RVE window on the right.

Designed to support the entire 3D IC design flow

Calibre 3DStress fits smoothly into each phase of the design lifecycle. Early-stage engineering can be greatly accelerated with quick “what-if” analyses of device and package layouts, helping teams identify and fix risky regions before committing to fabrication. As the design matures, flexible scenario analysis enables optimal device placement and materials selection.

At sign-off, comprehensive verification ensures the entire stack meets defined stress criteria, significantly reducing the risk of late surprises and post-manufacturing failures. Calibre 3DStress is tightly integrated with Siemens EDA’s full 3D IC design ecosystem—spanning package, layout, thermal, and electrical sign-off—so all insights flow together for efficient, aligned decision-making.

Visualization and back-annotation: turning results into decisions

Effective stress analysis requires not just robust simulation, but clarity in how results are presented and used. Calibre 3DStress delivers intuitive, interactive visualizations that help both designers and packaging engineers to investigate stress patterns, overlay findings on physical layouts, and collaborate on solutions. Results can be explored in Calibre RVE or exported for use with industry standard viewers.

Furthermore, Calibre 3DStress supports device-level back-annotation. This allows simulated stress effects—such as shifts in transistor mobility or piezoresistive changes—to be directly fed into electrical extraction and circuit simulation. Thus, physical reliability is no longer siloed from electrical sign-off, closing the loop for robust 3D IC development.

Reducing stress at every stage—literally

Advanced 3D ICs demand equal innovation in verification. With Siemens Calibre 3DStress, engineering teams can confidently manage the mechanical realities of their most advanced products, ensuring that stress risks are identified, visualized, and solved—well before they scale into yield or product challenges. The result is greater design freedom, more efficient collaboration, and a streamlined path to robust, first-pass silicon.

Interested in learning more about Calibre 3DStress or seeing it in action? Reach out to Siemens EDA or explore the full technical paper to discover how you can bring next-generation reliability into your 3D IC development.