Integrated circuit semiconductor device having a built-in self-repair circuit for an embedded memory and a method for repairing the memory

摘要

An integrated circuit semiconductor device comprises a built-in self-repair (BISR) circuit including a plurality of row fill entries and a plurality of column fill entries for storing faulty memory cell information of an embedded memory. Sizes of the row and column fill entries are determined by the numbers of row and column redundancies of the embedded memory. The row/column fill entries store row/column addresses of the faulty memory cells, and the number of the faulty memory cells occurring at the same row/column address, respectively. In addition, the row/column fill entries include pointers for indicating opposite entries storing the column/row address corresponding to the row/column address. For repairing the faulty memory cells with the row and column redundancies, the BISR circuit selects row/column fill entries and deletes the number of the fault memory cells stored in the opposite fill entry. Thus, the information is deleted from the row/column fill entries with the exception of information to be repaired. Therefore, the self-repair of the faulty memory cells can be performed in the BISR circuit in response to the remaining information.