Alleviating Through-Silicon-Via Electromigration for 3-D Integrated Circuits Taking Advantage of Self-Healing Effect

Abstract

Three-dimensional integration is considered to be a promising technology to tackle the global interconnect scaling problem for terascale integrated circuits (ICs). Three-dimensional ICs typically employ through-silicon-vias (TSVs) to vertically connect planar circuits. Due to its immature fabrication process, several defects, such as void, misalignment, and dust contamination, may be introduced. These defects can significantly increase current densities within TSVs and cause severe electromigration (EM) effects, which can degrade the reliability of 3-D ICs considerably. In this paper, we propose an effective framework to mitigate EM effect of the defective TSV. At first, we analyze various possible TSV defects and their impacts on EM reliability. Based on the observation that EM can be significantly alleviated by self-healing effect, we design an EM mitigation module to protect defective TSVs from EM. To guarantee EM mitigation efficiency, we propose two defective TSV protection schemes, i.e., neighbor sharing and global sharing. Experimental results show that the global-sharing scheme performs the best and can improve the EM mean time to failure by more than 70× on average with only 0.7% area overhead and less than 0.5% performance degradation compared with naked design without any EM protection.Index Terms-3-D integrated circuits (ICs), electro migration (EM), reliability, self-healing effect, throughsilicon-via (TSV).

Study of the Interconnect Failure Mechanism and Micro-effort for ULSI

“…Because the change of materials is inevitable, so the repair is incomplete. In the case of alternating current or pulse, self-healing effect improves the EM lifetime and is benefit to interconnect reliability [32].…”

Multiphysics characterization of polymer‐filled through‐silicon vias (PF‐TSVs) for three‐dimensional integration

“…[2][3][4][5][6] However, because of the thermal stress arising from the thermal expansion mismatch between constitute materials, TSVs suffer from various types of faults including pinholes and voids, which may result in degradation in performance and reliability. [7][8][9][10] Moreover, the deformations and cracks of TSVs may be extensively caused by the self-heating, electrostatic discharge, and other unintentional current and voltage pulses. 11 These reliability issues of the TSVs have aroused a lot of interest, and the related literatures have been reported.…”

“…By using the TSV technique, the miniaturization and high‐density 3‐D integrated systems can be achieved . However, because of the thermal stress arising from the thermal expansion mismatch between constitute materials, TSVs suffer from various types of faults including pinholes and voids, which may result in degradation in performance and reliability . Moreover, the deformations and cracks of TSVs may be extensively caused by the self‐heating, electrostatic discharge, and other unintentional current and voltage pulses .…”