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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. If one TSV exhibits a defect during its manufacturing process, the probability of multiple defects occurring in the TSVs neighboring the faulty TSV increases, i.e., the TSV defects tend to be clustered, which significantly reduces the yield of 3-D integrated circuit. To resolve the clustered TSV faults, router-based, ring-based, group-based, and cellular-based redundant TSV (RTSV) architectures were proposed. However, the repair rate is low and the hardware overhead as well as delay overhead is high. In this article, we propose a honeycomb-based RTSV architecture to utilize the area and delay more efficiently as well as to maintain high yield. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture has a 99.84% repair rate for uniform faults and an 81.42% repair rate for highly clustered faults. The proposed design achieves a 51.66% reduction of hardware overhead compared with the router-based design and a 20.69%, 46.93%, 34.17%, and 11.15% reduction of total delay compared with ring-based, router-based, group-based, and cellular-based methods, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. If one TSV exhibits a defect during its manufacturing process, the probability of multiple defects occurring in the TSVs neighboring increases the faulty TSVs (FTSV), i.e., the TSV defects tend to be clustered which significantly reduces the yield of three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D-ICs). To resolve the clustered TSV faults, router-based and ring-based redundant TSV (RTSV) architecture were proposed. However, the repair rate is low and the hardware overhead is high. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-cellular based RTSV architecture to utilize the area more efficiently as well as to maintain high yield. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture has higher repair rate as well as more cost-effective overhead, compared with router-based and ring-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D-ICs), through silicon via (TSV) is a critical technique in providing vertical connections. However, yield is one of the key obstacles to adopt the TSV-based 3D-ICs technology in the industry. Various fault-tolerance structures using redundant TSVs to repair faulty functional TSVs have been proposed in the literature for yield and reliability enhancement. However, the TSV repair paths under delay constraint cannot always be generated due to the lack of appropriate repair algorithms. In this article, we propose an effective TSV repair strategy for the router-based TSV redundancy architecture, taking into account the delay overhead. First, we prove that the router-based fault-tolerance structure configuration (RFSC) with the delay constraint is equivalent to the length-bounded multicommodity flow (LBMCF) problem. Then, an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation with acceptable scalability is presented to solve the LBMCF problem. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art fault-tolerance designs, the proposed ILP model can provide higher yield and lower delay overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]