A Novel and Efficient Non-Destructive Fault Isolation Methodology for Package-on-Package Module Based on Electromagnetic/Circuit Co-Simulation

This paper proposes a non-destructive simulation-based fault isolation methodology based on the time-domain reflectometry (TDR) technique. The main idea of the proposed methodology is to replace the extra prepared samples with efficient simulations of circuitries in good and faulty conditions. By extracting the S-parameters of the vertical interconnect with dominant length and modeling all horizontal interconnects as circuit elements in a simple and efficient way, the good and faulty circuitries of the module under test can be emulated in circuit simulator. Based on the comparison and analysis of the simulated and measured TDR impedances, the interconnect fault is successfully isolated without the help of extra prepared samples.