A TSV Misalignment-Based Repair Architecture in 3-D Chips

As a critical component of 3-D integrated circuits (3D-ICs), the quality of through-silicon vias (TSVs) significantly impacts the yield and reliability of 3D-ICs, especially the clustered faults during manufacturing. In this article, a repair architecture based on TSV misalignment is proposed. This architecture achieves a higher repair rate by physically connecting the signal not to its closest TSV but only to the TSVs far away from each other. Experimental results show that the average repair rate of the proposed architecture increases by 13.42% compared to the existing repair architectures of the same type for clustered faults. Compared to the router-based architecture, the proposed architecture has a similar average repair rate with less than 0.15% difference in fewer than eight clustered faults, reducing the delay and MUX area overhead by 70.27% and 54.17%, respectively.