A Built-In Self-Repair Scheme for Semiconductor Memories with 2-D Redundancy

Embedded memories are among the most widely used cores in current system-on-chip (SOC) implementations. Memory cores usually occupy a significant portion of the chip area, and dominate the manufacturing yield of the chip. Efficient yield-enhancement techniques for embedded memories thus are important for SOC. In this paper we present a built-in self-repair (BISR) scheme for semiconductor memories with 2-D redundancy structures. The BISR design is composed of a built-in self-test (BIST) module and a built-in redundancy analysis (BIRA) module. Our BIST circuit supports three test modes: the 1) main memory testing, 2) spare memory testing, and 3) repair modes. The BIRA module executes the proposed redundancy analysis (RA) algorithm for RAM with a 2-D redundancy structure, i.e., spare rows and spare columns. The BIRA module also serves as the reconfiguration (address remapping) unit in the normal mode. Experimental results show that a high repair rate (i.e., the ratio of the number of ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ITC
• Authors: Jin-Fu Li, Jen-Chieh Yeh, Rei-Fu Huang, Cheng-Wen Wu, Peir-Yuan Tsai, Archer Hsu, Eugene Chow
• Keywords: 2-d Redundancy Structure, Embedded Memories, Hardware, ITC 2003, Redundancy Analysis