Global Spare Blocks for Repair of Clustered Fault Cells in Embedded Memories

摘要

Spare full rows and columns are used in conventional memories to take care of any bad cells in memories. But this is not efficient as many chips do not become usable. Alternatively the spare redundant rows and redundant columns are bifurcated into blocks and block level repair can be attempted. A novel global feature is added to the spare blocks which enables the spare row (column) block to be used anywhere in the memory array. This memory hardware architecture can easily interface with embedded memory cores. A new algorithm, Essential Most Spare Pivoting (EMSP) is proposed which can be easily implemented in built-in configuration. The overhead area proposed in this paper is very less. The chip yield, reliability and repair rate are likely to improve significantly as per the simulation results.