TSV-OCT: A Scalable Online Multiple-TSV Defects Localization for Real-Time 3-D-IC Systems

In order to detect and localize through-silicon-via (TSV) failures in both manufacturing and operating phases, most of the existing methods use a dedicated testing mechanism with long response time and prerequisite interruptions for online testing. This article presents an error correction code (ECC)-based method named “TSV on-communication test” (TSV-OCT) to detect and localize faults without halting the operation of TSV-based 3-D-IC systems. We first propose a statistical detector, a method to detect open and short defects in TSVs that work in parallel with data transactions. Second, we propose an isolation-and-check algorithm to enhance the localization ability of the method. Moreover, the Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed statistical detector increases ×2 the number of detected faults when compared to conventional ECC-based techniques. With the help of isolation and check, TSV-OCT localizes the number of defects up to ×4 and ×5 higher. In addition, the response time is kept below 65000 cycles, which could be easily integrated into real-time applications. On the other hand, an implementation of TSV-OCT on a 3-D Network-on-Chip (NoC) router shows no performance degradation for testing while having a reasonable area overhead.