Architecture of Ring-based Redundant TSV for Clustered Faults

Abstract

Three-dimensional Integrated Circuits (3D-ICs) that employ the Through-Silicon Vias (TSVs) vertically stacking multiple dies provide many benefits, such as high density, high bandwidth, low-power. However, the fabrication and bonding of TSVs may fail because of many factors, such as the winding level of the thinned wafers, the surface roughness and cleaness of silicon dies, and bonding technology. To improve the yield of 3D-ICs, many redundant TSV architectures were proposed to repair 3D-ICs with faulty TSVs. These methods reroute siganls of faulty TSVs to other regular or redundant TSVs. In practice, the faulty TSVs may cluster because of imperfect bonding technology. To resolve the problem of clustered TSV faults, router-based [1] redundant TSV architecture was the first paper proposed to pay attention to this clustering problem. Their method enables faulty TSVs to be repaired by redundant TSVs that are farther apart. However, for some rarely occurring defective patterns, their method consumes too much area. In this paper, we propose a ring-based redundant TSV architecture to utilize the area more efficiently as well as to maintain high yield. Simulation results show that for a given number of TSVs (8 × 8) and TSV failure rate (1%), our design achieves 54% area reduction of MUXes per signal, while the yield of our ring-based redundant TSV architectures can still maintain 98.47% to 99.00% as compared with router-based desgin [1]. Furthermore, the minimum shifting length of our ring-based redundant TSV architecture is at most 1 which guarantees the minimum timing overhead of each signal.