Abstract
In today's multi-die ICs, the die-To-die interconnects are often complicated and susceptible to various kinds of manufacturing defects and stress-induced performance degradation in the field. This phenomenon has prompted a need to perform online monitoring of the signal integrity over the die-To-die interconnects for reliability critical applications. In this work, we present a slack-Time binning scheme so that one can constantly quantify the margin of a timing failure threat (TFT) occurring to a registered die-To-die interconnect. The proposed scheme attaches a Slack-Time Monitor (ST-monitor) to each Flip-Flop (FF) that receives a signal transmitted through a die-To-die interconnect under monitoring. Two techniques are introduced to enhance the traditional 'Timing-Violation Checker', namely (1) a tunable guard-band technique, and (2) an offset compensation technique. With these two techniques, one can perform online slack-Time binning. Experimental results using a 90nm CMOS process show that the proposed scheme has a low area overhead of only approximately 2.35 times the area of a boundary scan cell.