A cost-effective repair scheme for clustered TSV defects in 3D ICs. (February 2022) - Maity, Dilip Kumar
Abstract: The current industry trend favors TSV (Through-Silicon-Via) based 3D ICs (Three-dimensional Integrated-Circuits) due to their several benefits. However, the complex manufacturing process emanates defects in TSVs. At the same time, clustered nature of TSV defects increases the probability of multiple defective neighbors TSVs. Therefore, reliability is one of the significant issues in the industry adoption of 3D integration based on TSVs. The repair solution of employing spare TSVs is an acceptable solution to enhance reliability. However, this solution incurs a significant amount of overheads. This study presents a cost-effective repair architecture to address the clustered TSV defects by organizing the neighbor TSVs. The proposed scheme secures a high repair rate for densely clustered defects. Besides, the proposed scheme reduces the significant area overhead compared to the existing TSV redundancy architectures. Highlights: This work selects the routing path through the distant TSV rather than the vulnerable neighbor TSVs. Therefore, the proposed repair scheme can recover multiple densely clustered TSV defects. In the case of a strong clustering effect, the proposed solution achieves a high repair rate. Up to 4 x 4 cluster windows, the proposed scheme achieves a repair rate of 100%. The proposed scheme needs a small area overhead to achieve a similar repair rate. The proposed scheme reduces 25% or more control logic area overhead compared to the existing solution. The worst-case delay of the proposed method is 430 ps, which ensures the timing constraint of the critical path. The proposed scheme is suitable for repairing the clustered TSV defects.