Low-Power Clock Tree Design for Pre-Bond Testing of 3-D Stacked ICs

• Authors: Xin Zhao;D. L. Lewis;H. -H.S. Lee; Sung Kyu Lim
• Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
• Year: 2011

Pre-bond testing of 3-D stacked integrated circuits (ICs) involves testing each individual die before bonding. The overall yield of 3-D ICs improves with pre-bond testability because manufacturers can avoid stacking defective dies with good ones. However, pre-bond testability presents unique challenges to 3-D clock tree design. First, each die needs a complete 2-D clock tree to enable pre-bond test. Second, the entire 3-D stack needs a complete 3-D clock tree for post-bond test and operation. In the case of a two-die stack, a straightforward solution is to have two complete 2-D clock trees connected with a single through-silicon-via (TSV). We show that this solution suffers from long wirelength (WL) and high clock power consumption. Our algorithm improves on this solution, minimizes the overall WL and clock power consumption, and provides both pre-bond testability and post-bond operability with minimum skew and constrained slew. Compared with the single-TSV solution, SPICE simulation results show that our multi-TSV approach significantly reduces the clock power by up to 15.9% for two-die and 29.7% for four-die stacks. In addition, the WL is reduced by up to 24.4% and 42.0%.