3-D-stacked integrated circuits (ICs) that employ through-silicon vias (TSVs) to connect multiple dies vertically have gained wide-spread interest in the semiconductor industry. In order to be commercially viable, the assembly yield for 3-Dstacked ICs must be as high as possible, requiring TSVs to be reparable. Existing techniques typically assume TSV faults to be uniformly distributed and use neighboring TSVs to repair faulty ones, if any. In practice, however, clustered TSV faults are quite common due to the fact that the TSV bonding quality depends on surface roughness and cleanness of silicon dies, rendering prior TSV redundancy solutions less effective. Furthermore, existing techniques consume a lot of redundant TSVs that are still costly in the current TSV process. This inefficient TSV redundancy can limit the amount of TSVs that is allowed to use and may even become the obstacle to commercial production. To resolve this problem, we present a novel TSV repair framework, including a hardware redundancy architecture that enables faulty TSVs to be repaired by redundant TSVs that are farther apart, the corresponding repair algorithm and the redundancy architecture construction. By doing so, the manufacturing yield for 3-Dstacked ICs can be dramatically improved, as demonstrated in our experimental results. Index Terms-3-D stacking, redundancy, through-silicon vias (TSV) repair, yield enhancement.

Three-dimensional (3D) integration based on through-silicon-vias (TSVs) is rapidly gaining traction for industry adoption. However, manufacturing processes for TSVs have been shown to introduce new failure mechanisms. In particular, thermo-mechanical stress and electromigration introduce reliability threats for TSVs, e.g., voids and interfacial cracks, which can lead to hard-to-predict timing errors on critical paths with TSVs, thereby resulting in accelerated chip failure in the field. Burn-in for screening latent defects during manufacturing is expensive and its effectiveness for new TSV defect types has yet to be thoroughly characterized. We describe a reconfigurable in-field repair solution that is able to effectively tolerate latent TSV defects through the judicious use of spares. The proposed solution includes a reconfigurable repair architecture that enables spare TSV sharing between TSV grids, and the corresponding in-field repair algorithms. The effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed solution is evaluated using 3D benchmark designs.

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