R2-TSV: A repairable and reliable TSV set structure reutilizing redundancies

Recently, three-dimensional integrated circuit (3-D IC) design has attracted much attention, and the reliability of these systems has become increasingly important. In this paper, a new repairable and reliable through-silicon via (TSV) set structure is proposed. This proposed TSV set structure can be applied to the previous TSV repair structures which require TSV redundancies, and detects a defect or error reutilizing residual TSV redundancies for high reliability of 3-D ICs. Both online test and soft error detection/ analysis are supported by the proposed approach. Furthermore, a redundancy-sharing structure is introduced to guarantee a balanced detection rate among TSV sets and a reasonable full detection rate. The experimental results prove that the new approach guarantees high redundancy utilization efficiency and reliability of TSV. Also, they show that defect or error detection is achieved by the proposed TSV set structure.