This book describes innovative techniques to address the testing needs of 3D stacked integrated circuits (ICs) that utilize through-silicon-vias (TSVs) as vertical interconnects. The authors identify the key challenges facing 3D IC testing and present results that have emerged from cutting-edge research in this domain. Coverage includes topics ranging from die-level wrappers, self-test circuits, and TSV probing to test-architecture design, test scheduling, and optimization. Readers will benefit from an in-depth look at test-technology solutions that are needed to make 3D ICs a reality and commercially viable.

This book provides readers with an insightful guide to the design, testing and optimization of 2.5D integrated circuits. The authors describe a set of design-for-test methods to address various challenges posed by the new generation of 2.5D ICs, including pre-bond testing of the silicon interposer, at-speed interconnect testing, built-in self-test architecture, extest scheduling, and a programmable method for low-power scan shift in SoC dies. This book covers many testing techniques that have already been used in mainstream semiconductor companies. Readers will benefit from an in-depth look at test-technology solutions that are needed to make 2.5D ICs a reality and commercially viable.

This book provides readers with a variety of algorithms and software tools, dedicated to the physical design of through-silicon-via (TSV) based, three-dimensional integrated circuits. It describes numerous “manufacturing-ready” GDSII-level layouts of TSV-based 3D ICs developed with the tools covered in the book. This book will also feature sign-off level analysis of timing, power, signal integrity, and thermal analysis for 3D IC designs. Full details of the related algorithms will be provided so that the readers will be able not only to grasp the core mechanics of the physical design tools, but also to be able to reproduce and improve upon the results themselves. This book will also offer various design-for-manufacturability (DFM), design-for-reliability (DFR), and design-for-testability (DFT) techniques that are considered critical to the physical design process.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on VSLI Design and Test, VDAT 2012, held in Shibpur, India, in July 2012. The 30 revised regular papers presented together with 10 short papers and 13 poster sessions were carefully selected from 135 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on VLSI design, design and modeling of digital circuits and systems, testing and verification, design for testability, testing memories and regular logic arrays, embedded systems: hardware/software co-design and verification, emerging technology: nanoscale computing and nanotechnology.

This book starts with background concerning three-dimensional integration - including their low energy consumption and high speed image processing - and then proceeds to how to construct them and which materials to use in particular situations. The book covers numerous applications, including next generation smart phones, driving assistance systems, capsule endoscopes, homing missiles, and many others. The book concludes with recent progress and developments in three dimensional packaging, as well as future prospects.

This second edition of An Engineer's Guide to Automated Testing of High-Speed Interfaces provides updates to reflect current state-of-the-art high-speed digital testing with automated test equipment technology (ATE). Featuring clear examples, this one-stop reference covers all critical aspects of automated testing, including an introduction to high-speed digital basics, a discussion of industry standards, ATE and bench instrumentation for digital applications, and test and measurement techniques for characterization and production environment. Engineers learn how to apply automated test equipment for testing high-speed digital I/O interfaces and gain a better understanding of PCI-Express 4, 100Gb Ethernet, and MIPI while exploring the correlation between phase noise and jitter. This updated resource provides expanded material on 28/32 Gbps NRZ testing and wireless testing that are becoming increasingly more pertinent for future applications. This book explores the current trend of merging high-speed digital testing within the fields of photonic and wireless testing.

Many cutting-edge computer and electronic products are powered by advanced Systems-on-Chip (SoC). Advanced SoCs encompass superb performance together with large number of functions. This is achieved by efficient integration of huge number of transistors. Such very large scale integration is enabled by a core-based design paradigm as well as deep-submicron and 3D-stacked-IC technologies. These technologies are susceptible to reliability and testing complications caused by thermal issues. Three crucial thermal issues related to temperature variations, temperature gradients, and temperature cycling are addressed in this thesis. Existing test scheduling techniques rely on temperature simulations to generate schedules that meet thermal constraints such as overheating prevention. The difference between the simulated temperatures and the actual temperatures is called temperature error. This error, for past technologies, is negligible. However, advanced SoCs experience large errors due to large process variations. Such large errors have costly consequences, such as overheating, and must be taken care of. This thesis presents an adaptive approach to generate test schedules that handle such temperature errors. Advanced SoCs manufactured as 3D stacked ICs experience large temperature gradients. Temperature gradients accelerate certain early-life defect mechanisms. These mechanisms can be artificially accelerated using gradient-based, burn-in like, operations so that the defects are detected before shipping. Moreover, temperature gradients exacerbate some delay-related defects. In order to detect such defects, testing must be performed when appropriate temperature-gradients are enforced. A schedule-based technique that enforces the temperature-gradients for burn-in like operations is proposed in this thesis. This technique is further developed to support testing for delay-related defects while appropriate gradients are enforced. The last thermal issue addressed by this thesis is related to temperature cycling. Temperature cycling test procedures are usually applied to safety-critical applications to detect cycling-related early-life failures. Such failures affect advanced SoCs, particularly through-silicon-via structures in 3D-stacked-ICs. An efficient schedule-based cycling-test technique that combines cycling acceleration with testing is proposed in this thesis. The proposed technique fits into existing 3D testing procedures and does not require temperature chambers. Therefore, the overall cycling acceleration and testing cost can be drastically reduced. All the proposed techniques have been implemented and evaluated with extensive experiments based on ITC’02 benchmarks as well as a number of 3D stacked ICs. Experiments show that the proposed techniques work effectively and reduce the costs, in particular the costs related to addressing thermal issues and early-life failures. We have also developed a fast temperature simulation technique based on a closed-form solution for the temperature equations. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed simulation technique reduces the schedule generation time by more than half.