Reliability of ECC-based Memory Architectures with Online Self-repair Capabilities

摘要

Embedded memory is extensively being used in SoCs, and is rapidly growing in size and density. To keep up with the development pace of nanoscale devices, enhancement methods for yields and reliability must overcome the barriers set forth by advent of new technology. To address the issue of reliability, periodic online field test and repair are implemented by using synergistic approach of employing redundancy and ECC to repair or correct both hard errors and soft errors. In this paper, an online remap strategy for memory repair, which ensures 'fresh' memory words are always used until the spare words run out, is proposed, and the improvement of reliability for memory architectures using the proposed scheme is demonstrated.