3D Clock Routing for Pre-bond Testability

Abstract

Pre-bond testing of 3D stacked ICs involves testing each individual die before bonding. The overall yield of 3D ICs improves with pre-bond testability because manufacturers can avoid stacking defective dies with good ones. However, pre-bond testability presents unique challenges to 3D clock tree design. First, each die needs a complete 2D clock tree to enable pre-bond test. Second, the entire 3D stack needs a complete 3D clock tree for post-bond test and operation. In the case of a two-die stack, a straightforward solution is to have two complete 2D clock trees connected with a single through-silicon-via (TSV). In this chapter, we show that this solution suffers from long wirelength and high clock power consumption. Our algorithm improves on this solution, minimizes the overall wirelength and clock power consumption, and provides both pre-bond testability and post-bond operability with minimum skew and constrained slew. Compared with the single-TSV solution, SPICE simulation results show that our multi-TSV approach significantly reduces the clock power by up to 15.9 % for two-die and 29.7 % for four-die stacks. In addition, the wirelength is reduced by up to 24.4 and 42.0 %.