Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) that employ through-silicon vias (TSVs) integrating multiple dies vertically have opened up the potential of highly improved circuit designs. However, various types of TSV defects may occur during the assembly process, especially the clustered TSV faults because of the winding level of thinned wafer, the surface roughness and cleanness of silicon dies,inducing TSV yield reduction greatly. To tackle this fault clustering problem, router-based and ring-based TSV redundancy architectures were previously proposed. However, these schemes either require too much area overhead or have limited reparability to tolerant clustered TSV faults. Furthermore, the repairing lengths of these schemes are too long to be ignored, leading to additional delay overhead, which may cause timing violation. In this paper, we propose a region-based TSV redundancy design to achieve relatively high reparability as well as low additional delay overhead. Simulation results show that for a given number of TSVs (8*8) and TSV failure rate (1%), our design achieves 11.27% and 20.79% reduction of delay overhead as compared with router-based design and ring-based scheme, respectively. In addition, the reparability of our proposed scheme is much better than ring-based design by 30.84%, while it is close to that of the router-based scheme. More importantly, the overall TSV yield of our design achieves 99.88%, which is slightly higher than that of both router-based method (99.53%) and ring-based design (99.00%).

In 2000, Sandirigama, Shimizu, and Noda proposed a simple password authentication scheme, SAS. However, SAS was later found to be flawed. Recently, Chen, Lee, Horng proposed two SAS-like schemes, which were claimed to be more secure than similar schemes. Herein, we show that both their schemes are still vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Additionally, Chen-Lee-Horng's second scheme is not easily reparable.

Recently, Das et al. proposed a dynamic ID-based verifier-free password authentication scheme using smart cards. To resist the ID-theft attack, the user's login ID is dynamically generated and one-time used. Herein, we demonstrate that Das et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to an impersonation attack, in which the adversary can easily impersonate any user to login the server at any time. Furthermore, we also show several minor weaknesses of Das et al.'s scheme.