Physical design methodologies for monolithic 3D ICs

The objective of this research is to develop physical design methodologies for monolithic 3D ICs and use them to evaluate the improvements in the power-performance envelope offered over 2D ICs. In addition, design-for-test (DfT) techniques essential for the adoption of shorter term through-silicon-via (TSV) based 3D ICs are explored. Testing of TSV-based 3D ICs is one of the last challenges facing their commercialization. First, a pre-bond testable 3D scan chain construction technique is developed. Next, a transition-delay-fault test architecture is presented, along with a study on how to mitigate IR-drop. Finally, to facilitate partitioning, a quick and accurate framework for test-TSV estimation is developed. Block-level monolithic 3D ICs will be the first to emerge, as significant IP can be reused. However, no physical design flows exist, and hence a monolithic 3D floorplanning framework is developed. Next, inter-tier performance differences that arise due to the not yet mature fabrication process are investigated and modeled. Finally, an inter-tier performance-difference aware floorplanner is presented, and it is demonstrated that high quality 3D floorplans are achievable even under these inter-tier differences. Monolithic 3D offers sufficient integration density to place individual gates in three dimensions and connect them together. However, no tools or techniques exist that can take advantage of the high integration density offered. Therefore, a gate-level framework that leverages existing 2D ICs tools is presented. This framework also provides congestion modeling and produces results that minimize routing congestion. Next, this framework is extended to commercial 2D IC tools, so that steps such as timing optimization and clock tree synthesis can be applied. Finally, a voltage-drop-aware partitioning technique is presented that can alleviate IR-drop issues, without any impact on the performance or maximum operating temperature of the chip.Ph.D

공정변이를 고려한 3차원 집적 회로 설계 및 패키징 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2014. 2. 김태환.As CMOS scaling down, The control of variation in chip performance (i.e. speed and power) becomes highly important to improve the chip yield. The increased variation of chip performance demands additional design efforts such as the increase of guard-band or longer design turnaround time (TAT), which cause degradation of both chip performance and economic profit. Meanwhile, through-silicon via (TSV) based 3D technology has been regarded as the promising solution for long interconnect wire and huge die size problem. Since a 3D IC is manufactured by stacking multiple dies which are fabricated in different wafers, integration of the dies that have far different process characteristic can enlarge the difference of device performance on different dies within a single chip. In this dissertation, we analyze the effect of on-package (within-chip) variation on 3D IC and presents effective methods to mitigate the onpackage variation. First, a parametric yield improvement method is presented to resolve the mismatches of dies having different process characteristic. Comprehensive 3D integration algorithms considering post-silicon tuning technique is developed for the multi-layered 3D IC. Then, we show that a careful clock edge embedding in 3D clock tree can greatly reduce the impact of on-package variation on 3D clock skew and propose a two-step solution for the problem of on-package variation-aware layer embedding in 3D clock tree synthesis. In summary, this dissertation presents effective 3D integration method and 3D clock tree synthesis algorithm for process-variation tolerant 3D IC designs.Abstract i Contents ii List of Figures iv List of Tables vii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Process Variation in 3D ICs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Contributions of This Dissertation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2 Post-silicon Tuning Aware Die/WaferMatching Algorithms for Enhancing Parametric Yield of 3D IC Design 7 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.2 Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.3 The Die-to-Die Matching Problem and Proposed Algorithm Considering Body Biasing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.3.1 Motivation and Problem Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.3.2 The Proposed Die-to-Die Matching Algorithm . . . . . . . . 15 2.4 TheWafer-to-Wafer Matching Problem and Proposed Algorithm Considering Body Biasing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.4.1 Problem Definition and The Proposed Wafer-to-Wafer Matching Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.5 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 2.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3 Edge Layer Embedding Algorithm for Mitigating On-Package Variation in 3D Clock Tree Synthesis 32 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3.2 Problem Definitions and Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.3 The Proposed Algorithm for On-Package Variation Aware Edge Embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 3.3.1 Algorithm for Maximizing Layer Sharing of Edges . . . . . . 39 3.3.2 Refinement: Partial Edge Embedding on Layers . . . . . . . . 47 3.3.3 Clock Tree Routing and Buffer Insertion . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 3.4 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 3.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4 Conclusion 64 4.1 Chapter 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 4.2 Chapter 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Abstract in Korean 72Docto

Signaling in 3-D integrated circuits, benefits and challenges

Three-dimensional (3-D) or vertical integration is a design and packaging paradigm that can mitigate many of the increasing challenges related to the design of modern integrated systems. 3-D circuits have recently been at the spotlight, since these circuits provide a potent approach to enhance the performance and integrate diverse functions within amulti-plane stack. Clock networks consume a great portion of the power dissipated in a circuit. Therefore, designing a low-power clock network in synchronous circuits is an important task. This requirement is stricter for 3-D circuits due to the increased power densities. Synchronization issues can be more challenging for 3-D circuits since a clock path can spread across several planes with different physical and electrical characteristics. Consequently, designing low power clock networks for 3-D circuits is an important issue. Resonant clock networks are considered efficient low-power alternatives to conventional clock distribution schemes. These networks utilize additional inductive circuits to reduce power while delivering a full swing clock signal to the sink nodes. In this research, a design method to apply resonant clocking to synthesized clock trees is proposed. Manufacturing processes for 3-D circuits include some additional steps as compared to standard CMOS processes which makes 3-D circuits more susceptible to manufacturing defects and lowers the overall yield of the bonded 3-D stack. Testing is another complicated task for 3-D ICs, where pre-bond test is a prerequisite. Pre-bond testability, in turn, presents new challenges to 3-D clock network design primarily due to the incomplete clock distribution networks prior to the bonding of the planes. A design methodology of resonant 3-D clock networks that support wireless pre-bond testing is introduced. To efficiently address this issue, inductive links are exploited to wirelessly transmit the clock signal to the disjoint resonant clock networks. The inductors comprising the LC tanks are used as the receiver circuit for the links, essentially eliminating the need for additional circuits and/or interconnect resources during pre-bond test. Recent FPGAs are quite complex circuits which provide reconfigurablity at the cost of lower performance and higher power consumption as compared to ASIC circuits. Exploiting a large number of programmable switches, routing structures are mainly responsible for performance degradation in FPAGs. Employing 3-D technology can providemore efficient switches which drastically improve the performance and reduce the power consumption of the FPGA. RRAM switches are one of the most promising candidates to improve the FPGA routing architecture thanks to their low on-resistance and non-volatility. Along with the configurable switches, buffers are the other important element of the FPGAs routing structure. Different characteristics of RRAM switches change the properties of signal paths in RRAM-based FPGAs. The on resistance of RRAMswitches is considerably lower than CMOS pass gate switches which results in lower RC delay for RRAM-based routing paths. This different nature in critical path and signal delay in turn affect the need for intermediate buffers. Thus the buffer allocation should be reconsidered. In the last part of this research, the effect of intermediate buffers on signal propagation delay is studied and a modified buffer allocation scheme for RRAM-based FPGA routing path is proposed

Integrating specification and test requirements as constraints in verification strategies for 2D and 3D analog and mixed signal designs

Analog and Mixed Signal (AMS) designs are essential components of today’s modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) used in the interface between real world signals and the digital world. They present, however, significant verification challenges. Out-of-specification failures in these systems have steadily increased, and have reached record highs in recent years. Increasing design complexity, incomplete/wrong specifications (responsible for 47% of all non functional ICs) as well as additional challenges faced when testing these systems are obvious reasons. A particular example is the escalating impact of realistic test conditions with respect to physical (interface between the device under test (DUT) and the test instruments, input-signal conditions, input impedance, etc.), functional (noise, jitter) and environmental (temperature) constraints. Unfortunately, the impact of such constraints could result in a significant loss of performance and design failure even if the design itself was flawless. Current industrial verification methodologies, each addressing specific verification challenges, have been shown to be useful for detecting and eliminating design failures. Nevertheless, decreases in first pass silicon success rates illustrate the lack of cohesive, efficient techniques to allow a predictable verification process that leads to the highest possible confidence in the correctness of AMS designs. In this PhD thesis, we propose a constraint-driven verification methodology for monitoring specifications of AMS designs. The methodology is based on the early insertion of test(s) associated with each design specification. It exploits specific constraints introduced by these planned tests as well as by the specifications themselves, as they are extracted and used during the verification process, thus reducing the risk of costly errors caused by incomplete, ambiguous or missing details in the specification documents. To fully analyze the impact of these constraints on the overall AMS design behavior, we developed a two-phase algorithm that automatically integrates them into the AMS design behavioral model and performs the specifications monitoring in a Matlab simulation environment. The effectiveness of this methodology is demonstrated for two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) ICs. Our results show that our approach can predict out-of-specification failures, corner cases that were not covered using previous verification methodologies. On one hand, we show that specifications satisfied without specification and test-related constraints have failed in the presence of these additional constraints. On the other hand, we show that some specifications may degrade or even cannot be verified without adding specific specification and test-related constraints

Design-for-Test and Test Optimization Techniques for TSV-based 3D Stacked ICs

<p>As integrated circuits (ICs) continue to scale to smaller dimensions, long interconnects</p><p>have become the dominant contributor to circuit delay and a significant component of</p><p>power consumption. In order to reduce the length of these interconnects, 3D integration</p><p>and 3D stacked ICs (3D SICs) are active areas of research in both academia and industry.</p><p>3D SICs not only have the potential to reduce average interconnect length and alleviate</p><p>many of the problems caused by long global interconnects, but they can offer greater design</p><p>flexibility over 2D ICs, significant reductions in power consumption and footprint in</p><p>an era of mobile applications, increased on-chip data bandwidth through delay reduction,</p><p>and improved heterogeneous integration.</p><p>Compared to 2D ICs, the manufacture and test of 3D ICs is significantly more complex.</p><p>Through-silicon vias (TSVs), which constitute the dense vertical interconnects in a</p><p>die stack, are a source of additional and unique defects not seen before in ICs. At the same</p><p>time, testing these TSVs, especially before die stacking, is recognized as a major challenge.</p><p>The testing of a 3D stack is constrained by limited test access, test pin availability,</p><p>power, and thermal constraints. Therefore, efficient and optimized test architectures are</p><p>needed to ensure that pre-bond, partial, and complete stack testing are not prohibitively</p><p>expensive.</p><p>Methods of testing TSVs prior to bonding continue to be a difficult problem due to test</p><p>access and testability issues. Although some built-in self-test (BIST) techniques have been</p><p>proposed, these techniques have numerous drawbacks that render them impractical. In this dissertation, a low-cost test architecture is introduced to enable pre-bond TSV test through</p><p>TSV probing. This has the benefit of not needing large analog test components on the die,</p><p>which is a significant drawback of many BIST architectures. Coupled with an optimization</p><p>method described in this dissertation to create parallel test groups for TSVs, test time for</p><p>pre-bond TSV tests can be significantly reduced. The pre-bond probing methodology is</p><p>expanded upon to allow for pre-bond scan test as well, to enable both pre-bond TSV and</p><p>structural test to bring pre-bond known-good-die (KGD) test under a single test paradigm.</p><p>The addition of boundary registers on functional TSV paths required for pre-bond</p><p>probing results in an increase in delay on inter-die functional paths. This cost of test</p><p>architecture insertion can be a significant drawback, especially considering that one benefit</p><p>of 3D integration is that critical paths can be partitioned between dies to reduce their delay.</p><p>This dissertation derives a retiming flow that is used to recover the additional delay added</p><p>to TSV paths by test cell insertion.</p><p>Reducing the cost of test for 3D-SICs is crucial considering that more tests are necessary</p><p>during 3D-SIC manufacturing. To reduce test cost, the test architecture and test</p><p>scheduling for the stack must be optimized to reduce test time across all necessary test</p><p>insertions. This dissertation examines three paradigms for 3D integration - hard dies, firm</p><p>dies, and soft dies, that give varying degrees of control over 2D test architectures on each</p><p>die while optimizing the 3D test architecture. Integer linear programming models are developed</p><p>to provide an optimal 3D test architecture and test schedule for the dies in the 3D</p><p>stack considering any or all post-bond test insertions. Results show that the ILP models</p><p>outperform other optimization methods across a range of 3D benchmark circuits.</p><p>In summary, this dissertation targets testing and design-for-test (DFT) of 3D SICs.</p><p>The proposed techniques enable pre-bond TSV and structural test while maintaining a</p><p>relatively low test cost. Future work will continue to enable testing of 3D SICs to move</p><p>industry closer to realizing the true potential of 3D integration.</p>Dissertatio