Dynamic Built-In Redundancy Analysis for Memory Repair

As advances in memory density and capacity result in an increase in the probability of fault occurrence, many studies on built-in redundancy analysis (BIRA) have been conducted to address this problem. However, conventional BIRAs cannot directly find a final repair solution as soon as test sequences of the built-in self-test (BIST) are over, because they require starting the fault analyses after finishing the test sequences to achieve an optimal repair rate. For this reason, additional analysis time is inevitable, which affects total test costs. In this paper, a dynamic BIRA is proposed for memory repair. It can find a final repair solution directly as soon as test sequences if the BIST are over and achieve an optimal repair rate. The proposed BIRA can restore faults in fault-storing content-addressable memories whenever the spaces in them can be reduced via dynamic fault analysis. Furthermore, the proposed BIRA can be implemented with a reasonable hardware size. This is demonstrated via experiments.