An Advanced and more Efficient Built-in Self-Repair Strategy for Embedded SRAM with Selectable Redundancy

Built-in self-test (BIST) refers to those testing techniques where additional hardware is added to a design so that testing is accomplished without the aid of external hardware. Usually, a pseudo-random generator is used to apply test vectors to the circuit under test and a data compactor is used to produce a signature. To increase the reliability and yield of embedded memories, many redundancy mechanisms have been proposed. All the redundancy mechanisms bring penalty of area and complexity to embedded memories design. To solve the problem, a new redundancy scheme is proposed in this paper. Some normal words in embedded memories can be selected as redundancy instead of adding spare words, spare rows, spare columns or spare blocks. Built-In Self-Repair (BISR) with Redundancy is an effective yield-enhancement strategy for embedded memories. This paper proposes an efficient BISR strategy which consists of a Built-In Self-Test (BIST) module, a Built-In AddressAnalysis (BIAA) module and a Multiplexer (MUX) module. The BISR is designed flexible that it can provide four operation modes to SRAM users. Each fault address can be saved only once is the feature of the proposed BISR strategy. In BIAA module, fault addresses and redundant ones form a one-to-one mapping to achieve a high repair speed. Besides, instead of adding spare words, rows, columns or blocks in the SRAMs, users can select normal words as redundancy.