Temperature-Gradient-Based Burn-In and Test Scheduling for 3-D Stacked ICs

Large temperature gradients exacerbate various types of defects including early-life failures and delay faults. Efficient detection of these defects requires that burn-in and test for delay faults, respectively, are performed when temperature gradients with proper magnitudes are enforced on an Integrated Circuit (IC). This issue is much more important for 3-D stacked ICs (3-D SICs) compared with 2-D ICs because of the larger temperature gradients in 3-D SICs. In this paper, two methods to efficiently enforce the specified temperature gradients on the IC, for burn-in and delay-fault test, are proposed. The specified temperature gradients are enforced by applying high-power stimuli to the cores of the IC under test through the test access mechanism. Therefore, no external heating mechanism is required. The tests, high power stimuli, and cooling intervals are scheduled together based on temperature simulations so that the desired temperature gradients are rapidly enforced. The schedule generation is guided by functions derived from a set of thermal equations. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods.