A Comparative Study of Pre-bond TSV Test Methodologies

A comparative study of pre-bond TSV test methodologies is presented in this paper. The study includes the impact of interconnect wires and I/O transmitter and receiver parameters on the sensitivities of the test methods. We study four classes of test methods. Simulation results provided show that two classes, ring-oscillator based [7], [8] and pulse-shrinking based method [15], are insensitive to open and short defects. We also show that there is a trade-off in using the other two methods. The sense-amplifier based method [12], [13], [19] is sensitive to open defects. However, it has limited sensitivity to leakage defects and has limitations in its use for high speed I/Os. On the other hand the pulse counting method [18], [14] is sensitive to both open and leakage defects and can be used for high speed I/Os, However, it consumes more power and requires more time for tests than the sense-amplifier based method. These results can be leveraged to identify usage guidelines for these methods.