A 3-D Rotation-Based Through-Silicon via Redundancy Architecture for Clustering Faults

Abstract

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3-D ICs), which feature many benefits, such as high bandwidth and a high degree of integration, have recently received considerable attention from the semiconductor industry. However, these chips feature through-silicon vias (TSVs), which vertically connect multiple dies, and these TSVs may fail, resulting in a decreased yield. Unfortunately, previously proposed methods to repair TSVs cannot handle certain failure patterns. For example, existing techniques cannot repair clustered TSV faults, which commonly occur in practice. Furthermore, the number of signal TSVs typically determines the number of redundant TSVs, which may result in wasteful and redundant TSVs. In this paper, a new TSV repair scheme is proposed that replaces defective TSVs with redundant TSVs by utilizing the architecture of a cube, which can replace any face with any of the other faces. Both signal TSVs and redundant TSVs are placed in the face of cube, so any faulted TSVs can be replaced with redundant TSVs. The experimental results indicate that the new method guarantees 100% coverage with any number of signal TSVs and redundant TSVs.