A new die-level flexible design-for-test architecture for 3D stacked ICs

A die-level design-for-test architecture for 3D stacked ICs is proposed. The main component of this architecture is a newly proposed configurable boundary cell, based on which flexible parallel test is achieved. Both of the number of parallel scan chains and their lengths can be configured during test. This test architecture features light-weight, high flexibility in parallel test configuration, modularity, and IEEE P1149.1 compatibility. In this work, both infrastructure and implementation aspects are illustrated. Experimental results demonstrate desired test acceleration. The acceleration ratio approximately reaches its limit, which equals the number of parallel scan chains, when the number of test vectors is over 300.