Design of generic embedded memory built in self test circuit

Abstract

With the increment of area of memory in SoC, embedded memory test is becoming increasingly significant. The March algorithm and its derived algorithms, which are the mainstream algorithm in memory test domain, can achieve very good effects in terms of testing time and fault coverage. However, because of the different accesses of different types of memories, the same algorithm cannot apply to testing different types of memories. In SoC, implanting different circuits for testing different types of memories will result in high hardware overhead. To solve this problem, we design a generic embedded memory built-in self-test circuit which, according to different types of memories, chooses the suitable testing algorithms through configuring a set of March algorithm registers. This method will make the testing circuit adapt to different types of memories and the corresponding hardware overhead is relatively low. Verified by Modelsim simulation, this method has a flexible configuration and has a high coverage of common faults.