HotCluster: A Thermal-Aware Defect Recovery Method for Through-Silicon-Vias Toward Reliable 3-D ICs Systems

Through silicon via (TSV) is considered as the near-future solution to realize low-power and high-performance 3D-integrated circuits (3D-ICs) and 3D-Network-on-Chips (3D-NoCs). However, the lifetime reliability issue of TSV due to its fault sensitivity and the high operating temperature of 3D-ICs, which also accelerates the fault rate, is one of the most critical challenges. Meanwhile, most current works focus on detecting and correcting TSV defects after manufacturing without considering high-temperature nodes’ impact on lifetime reliability. Besides, the recovery for defective clusters is also challenging because of costly redundancies. In this work, we present
HotCluster
: a hotspot-aware self-correction platform for clustering defects in 3D-NoCs to help understand and tackle this problem. We first give a method to predict normalized fault rates and place redundant TSV groups according to each region’s fault rate. In our particular medium fault rate (normalized to the coolest area),
HotCluster
reduces about 60% of the redundancies in comparison to the uniformly distributed redundancies while having a higher ratio of router working in a normal state. Furthermore,
HotCluster
integrates both online (weight based) and offline (max-flow min-cut offline method) mapping algorithms to help the system correct the faulty TSV clusters. The experimental results show that both the max-flow min-cut offline method and weight-based online mode with a redundancy of 0.25 exhibits less than 1% of routers disabled under 50% defect rates.