Testing for Bounded Faults in RAMs

We study the class of “bounded faults” in random-access memories; these are faults that involve a bounded number of cells. This is a very general class of memory faults that includes, for example, the usual stuck-at, coupling, and pattern-sensitive faults, but also many other types of faults. Some bounded faults are known to require deterministic tests of length proportional to n log2 n, where n is the total number of memory cells. The main result of this paper is that, for any bounded fault satisfying certain very mild conditions, the random test length required for a given level of confidence is always O(n).