Deterministic tests for detecting single V-coupling faults in RAMs

In this article we consider the problem of detecting single V-coupling faults in nx1 RAMs, where n is the number of one-bit memory words. The V-coupling fault is a very general fault type that is used to represent the situation, involving V greater than or equal to 2 cells, when write operations addressed to one memory cell erroneously disturb the contents of a second cell, possibly subject to the presence of a particular pattern of data values stored in V-2 additional cells. The V-coupling fault can also represent many other fault types that have been proposed for RAM testing, such as stuck-at faults transition faults, coupling faults, and pattern-sensitive faults. Deterministic tests for single 5-coupling faults, like the one described have the convenient property of being able to detect pattern-sensitive faults regardless of the mapping from logical cell addresses to physical cell locations.