A New Cellular-Based Redundant TSV Structure for Clustered Faults

Due to the winding level of the thinned wafers and the surface roughness of silicon dies, the quality of through-silicon vias (TSVs) varies during the fabrication and bonding process, which greatly reduces the yield of 3-D-ICs. The basic method to repair faulty TSVs (FTSVs) is to transfer the signals on FTSVs through regular TSVs. Many redundant TSV (RTSV) structures have been proposed to repair uniformly distributed FTSVs. For clustering FTSVs, a router-based RTSV structure appears to be a good scheme. But it is not an economical method, since the structure consumes many more hardware resources than normal structures. In this paper, we propose a cellular-based RTSV structure to utilize hardware resources more efficiently for a higher yield. We propose a corresponding algorithm for recovery-route searching. Simulation results show that for 1E6 TSVs and a TSV failure rate of 0.01%, our design consumes only 4.5% more area of all STSVs to achieve a yield above 99.9%. We compare our structure with several other designs and demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of the proposed technique.