Online Fault Tolerance Technique for TSV-Based 3-D-IC

This brief presents the design, validation, and evaluation of an efficient online fault tolerance technique for fault detection and recovery in presence of three through-silicon-vias (TSV) defects: 1) voids; 2) delamination between TSV and landing pad; and 3) TSV short-to-substrate. The technique employs transition delay test for TSV fault detection. Fault recovery is achieved by employing redundant TSVs and rerouting signals to fault-free TSVs. This technique is efficient because it requires a small (2× number of TSVs per group) number of clock cycles for fault detection and recovery. Synthesis results using 130-nm design library show that 100% repair capability can be achieved with low area overhead (4% for the best case).