Soft repair technology aids memory reliability

Genesys Testware is to support Artisan's Flex-Repair memories with its Genesys's MBISTmaker product.

Genesys Testware is to support Artisan's Flex-Repair memories with the Genesys's MBISTmaker product.

Users of Artisan Flex-Repair memories now can implement the Genesys dynamic soft repair capability, thereby avoiding the arduous and expensive laser programmable fuse repair technology that is commonly used today.

With the Genesys dynamic soft repair capability, users of Artisan memory cores will no longer be required to purchase expensive laser programming machinery or deal with the complicated test results transferral process that is characteristic of laser programmable fuse repair.

Dynamic soft repair technology gives the customer a complete on-chip repair solution.

Instead of using laser-programmable fuses, dynamic soft repair uses multiplexers that can switch between a bad data bit and a good redundant bit.

Every time the chip powers up, the memory is tested and reconfigured if a failure is present.

With fuse technology, laser programmable fuses are used to correct bad data bits in a memory.

Faulty chips need to be run on a separate and expensive laser-programming machine to correct the memory failures.

"Our goal is to demystify the use of redundancy in embedded memories.

Artisan's Flex-Repair Memory solutions are designed with an "open-standard" interface to allow easy interoperability with leading embedded memory test solutions", said Dhrumil Gandhi, senior vice president of product technology at Artisan.

"We are pleased to have this support for Artisan's Flex-Repair Memories in Genesys's MBISTmaker product".

Genesys's MBISTmaker enables Artisan memory customers to implement a memory repair scheme that is either based on fuse or dynamic soft repair technology.

Genesys Testware customers, who are using Artisan memories, can now easily create built-in self-test, diagnosis and repair (BISTDR) wrapper circuits around the Artisan Flex-Repair memories by invoking the Artisan short-cut function in their MBISTmaker Tcl scripts.

The user can optionally add different types of fuse boxes automatically to the BISTDR wrapper by setting the appropriate variables in the MBISTmaker Tcl scripts.

This gives the user the flexibility to decide between laser repair and dynamic soft repair after the chip has taped out.

Artisan's Flex-Repair Memories provide an optimal redundancy scheme that is easy-to-use, reliable and cost efficient.

It allows customers complete control over various aspects of redundancy implementations.

Users can select, through the GUI, whether to generate memory instances, with or without redundancy, in order to improve memory yield.

Also, users can choose to combine the memory with, either a laser fuse or dynamic soft repair implementation.

This flexibility enables customers to get the most appropriate solution for their products.

In an actual application, the Artisan Flex-Repair Memories are configured with redundant bits.

The Genesys MBISTmaker creates the necessary processing logic to perform the required memory tests.

If an error is found diagnostic information about the failure is either shifted out and remapped to physical co-ordinates for laser fuse blowing if a fuse repair scheme is used, or to the onboard multiplexers if dynamic soft repair is used to repair the memory.

"By adding this additional capability to our MBISTmaker product, customers who use the Artisan Flex-Repair memories can now implement a complete, silicon proven yield enhancement solution", said Bejoy Oomman, President of Genesys Testware.

"With this addition we are now able to offer the most comprehensive embedded memory repair product in the industry".

MBISTmaker with support for Artisan Flex-Repair memories is available now.

MBISTmaker starts at US $42,000 for a single project license and US $140,000 for a perpetual, site licence.

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