Abstract
Three-dimensional IC (3D IC) exhibits various advantages over traditional two-dimensional IC (2D IC), including heterogeneous integration, reduced delay and power dissipation, compact device dimension, etc. Wafer-on-wafer stacking offers practical advantages in 3D IC fabrication, but it suffers from low compound yield. To improve the yield, a novel manipulation scheme of wafer named n-sector symmetry and cut (SSCn) is proposed. In this method, wafers with rotational symmetry are cut into n identical sectors, where n is a suitably chosen integer. The sectors are then used to replenish repositories. The SSCn method is combined with best-pair matching algorithm for compound yield evaluation. Simulation of wafers with nine different defect distributions shows that previously known plain rotation of wafers offers only a trivial benefits in yield. A cut number four is optimal for most of the defect models. The SSC4 provides significantly higher yield and the advantage becomes more obvious with increase of the repository size and the number of stacked layers. Cost model of SSCn is analyzed and the cost-effectiveness of SSC4 is established. Observations made are: 1) Cost benefits of SSC4 become larger as the manufacturing overhead of SSC4 become smaller, 2) cost improvement of SSC4 over conventional basic method increases as the number of stacked layers increases and 3) for most defect models, SSC4 largely reduces the cost even when manufacturing overhead of SSC4 is considered to be very large.
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