Built-In Self-Repair for Manufacturing and Runtime TSV Defects in 3D ICs

Abstract

Three-dimensional Integrated Circuit (3DIC) based on Through Silicon Vias (TSVs) has various benefits of wire length, power consumption, heterogeneous integration as compared to 2DIC. However, defects in TSVs due to manufacturing processes reduce the reliability of the 3DIC. Several state-of-art approaches have proposed to overcome these defects. However, TSVs can be failed during field operation due to Electromigration (EM), which becomes a major reliability concern in 3DICs. Therefore, detection and repair are crucial in the presence of EM failures. This paper presents a runtime dynamic Built-In Self-Repair (BISR) approach to enhance runtime reliability. BISR consists of a test scheme to pinpoint runtime defects as well as manufacturing defects and a repair scheme that replace defective TSVs with neighbor fault-free TSVs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the overall cost in terms of test time and area overhead significantly. The delay overhead of the repair solution is reasonable for 0.5 ns critical path latency.