Nonintrusive On-Line Transition-Time Binning and Timing Failure Threat Detection for Die-to-Die Interconnects

Die-to-die interconnects linking multiple functional dies in a modern 3-D or 2.5-D IC by micro-bumps could experience resistance increase after certain time of field operation due to parametric defects or aging. To cope with this reliability threat, we present an “on-line transition-time binning method” that aims to continuously detect excessive transition time occurring at a target die-to-die interconnect. Our method attaches a monitor to the termination end of each target interconnect. Any transition (rising or falling) is converted into a pulse-width first, which is then further compared to a dynamically tunable threshold for a binary pass/fail judgment. By multiple runs of transition-time monitoring while sweeping the threshold incrementally, the “transition-time bin” of each target interconnect can be derived and thereby a timing failure threat can be detected by a monitor center before it actually strikes.