EOF: Efficient Built-In Redundancy Analysis Methodology With Optimal Repair Rate

Abstract

Faulty cell repair with redundancy can improve memory yield. In particular, built-in redundancy analysis (BIRA) is widely used to enhance the yield of embedded memories. We propose an efficient BIRA algorithm to achieve the optimal repair rate with a very short analysis time and low hardware cost. The proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the number of backtracks in the exhaustive search algorithm: it uses early termination based on the number of orthogonal faulty cells and fault classification in fault collection. Experimental results show that the proposed BIRA methodology can achieve optimal repair rate with low hardware overhead and short analysis time, as compared to previous BIRA methods.