Built-In Self-Test/Repair Methodology for Multiband RF-Interconnected TSV 3D Integration

Multiband radio-frequency interconnect (MRFI) is an emerging technology to achieve low-latency and energy-efficient on-chip communication. This article proposes a BIST method to improve the reliability of MRFI-based design.

Self-Test/Repair Methodology for TSV-Based MRFI

MRFI is an energy efficiency interchip communication method without the need for a huge number of TSVs. MRFI modulates the transmit data into different frequency bands on the same transmission line. Then, the received data are demodulated by different frequency band with the corresponding bandpass filters. The adjacent wires may cause co-channel interference, resulting in a huge number of erroneous bits. However, cochannel interference can be decreased by selecting the appropriate carrier frequency bands. Therefore, MRFI can support an ultrahigh data rate communication link for 3-D ICs by increasing the number of frequency carriers. Using five-band quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation, each MRFI transceiver (TX + RX) transmits 8-bit data (DQ0–DQ7), one data mask (DM) signal, and one data strobe (DQS) signal. Thus, MRFI through one TSV pair is robust to channel attenuation. In the same data bandwidth, the number of TSVs for MRFI is only one-quarter TSVs of wide I/O (excluding DQS and DM).