Wrapper Chain Design for Testing TSVs Minimization in Circuit-Partitioned 3D SoC

Abstract

Three dimensional (3D) System-on-Chips (SoCs) that typically employ through-silicon vias (TSVs) as vertical interconnects, emerge as a promising solution to continue Moore's law. Whereas, it also brings challenging problems, one of which is the test wrapper chain design and optimization, especially for circuit-partitioned 3D SoCs in which scan chains can cross among layers. Test time is the primary goal for wrapper chain design, both for 2D and 3D SoCs. The 3D SoC wrapper chain design problem can be converted into the well-studied2D one by projecting wrapper chain components of all layers to one virtual layer. Thereafter, we can leverage 2D optimization algorithms to determine the composition of wrapper chains and thus guarantee minimal testing time for 3D SoCs. One specific thing for circuit-partitioned 3D SoCs is that TSVs are needed to connect cross-layer wrapper structures to form the wrapper chains. As TSVs occupy planar chip area and will aggravate the routing congestion problem, it is necessary to reduce TSVs for test purpose as much as possible. In this work, we observe that by varying the connection orders of wrapper chain components, e.g., scan chains and I/O cells, the TSVs consumed vary significantly. Based on the above, we formulate this problem and propose novel heuristic to tackle it. Experimental results show that the proposed solution can save on average 33.2% amount of TSVs when compared to a prior intuitive method.